"… Rice speeded up and overhauled its evaluation process this year after the elite private university lured away a top University of Pennsylvania admissions dean who oversaw the development of the method — called committee-based evaluation.
Rice’s record-high 20,898 applications - a year-over-year increase of more than 15 percent - would have overwhelmed admissions officers using the prior system in which individual staffers spent, in some cases, twice as long reading and summarizing a file.
With the new team-based method, pairs of admissions officers discuss each application piece by piece. One person read essays and recommendations. Another looks at academic prowess and test scores. Rice admissions officers this year evaluated six to 10 applications an hour for the first pass through the application files, said Yvonne Romero da Silva, the former Penn dean who is now Rice’s vice president for enrollment." …
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Rice-accepted-just-11-percent-of-applicants-this-12777700.php