<p>It's called "augmented review". Your chances of getting in are only IMPROVED by timely responding to the questions and getting great recommendations. If you are asked for your first semester senior grades, provide them and hope you did well. Or if you don't have them yet, let them know and provide it as soon as you receive them. My son received one for his learning disabilities and was accepted for the Fall, 2007. He loves Cal and is doing great, by the way!</p>
<p>Last year Rider nailed it as follows:</p>
<p>"For example, once Berkeley scores the applications, the take the ones that are in the cutoff zone, thus could be either an admit or a reject, and ask for additional information to perform an augmented review. This allows them to make the admit or reject decision for the few percent that are in this gray area. </p>
<p>UCB has three kinds of augmented review questionnaires, AFAIK. One is for someone who had disabilities or challenges, with a focus on guessing how the person might thrive or flounder at Cal. Another is for special talent, where the goal is to compose a well rounded class of 2012 by including a mix of interesting people to complement the high academic achievers. The first two would move people up whose academic performance alone didn't make the cut, while the third type seems to be used for those whose stats are high but right at the decision point.</p>
<p>Berkeley does initial scoring on a scale without much granularity -- eligible applicants are assigned 1, 2, 2.5, 3, 4, or 5. Other campuses such as UCSD use a more fine grained numerical scale and can hit the target number of admissions by selecting a precise value for a cutoff -- moving a number from 7500 to 7501 might be the fine tuning needed to get to the exact target admissions numbers. On the other hand, moving from 2.5 to 3 sweeps in a large number of applicants, so that whatever number UCB sets is going to geenrate either too many or too few for admissions. Augmented review helps sort through the pool to pick just enough to make their target. </p>
<p>UCLA and UCSD are said to also do augmented review, although the reasons and mechanics would vary in their case. For UCSD, since they have a very rigid and documented rubric for scoring, the augmented review might be sent out for students who are just short of the cutoff points but have ambiguous comments in the application that in some cases might qualify for points. By reading the response inthe augmented review, the points are either assigned or not, resulting in an admit or reject decision. UCSD sets its cutoff to buffer for a few such augmented cases and to buffer for a small number of appeals from rejected students who provide more information to prove they warrant points in some category."</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>