<p>is it okay if teacher recommendations are sent out/postmarked AFTER the deadline for most top universities?</p>
<p>even if it's "ok" (meaning they won't automatically deny you for not having everything complete by the deadlines) it's still going to hurt you at selective colleges. </p>
<p>There are a fixed number of seats to be handed out. Early on when few have been assigned the feeling is freer; still plenty left for those in the thick stack that haven't been reviewed yet. But towards the end when few seats are left it becomes tougher and tougher to say "admit" because the impact on those left to be reviewed is more obvious. This is from the book "The Gatekeepers" where the author followed the adcoms at a top LAC for a year.</p>
<p>How this affects you is the way reviews are done; at many schools an app will only be reviewed when it is complete. No sense wasting an adcom's time to read a partial app because she/he will have forgotten it and have to read the whole thing again when the missing info shows up. And without those recs in the file it isn't complete.</p>
<p>Does that mean they start reading the app's before the deadline?</p>