My son applied to UVA ED and his sis account currently has a blue “view decision” hyperlink and green check. He was excited and hoping he’d receive an earlier-early decision (he’s a strong applicant from cville) but when you click on the link, it says to check back 1/31. Does this mean his application has already been processed and is just hanging out waiting for the date all the application decisions are posted?
And as an aside, why does the early decision for UVA come out so late? I thought the whole point of ED was to help cut down on the number of applications students fill out.
…I think i’m so curious about this because i’m currently in grad school at UVA and they never sent me an acceptance email or (heaven forbid…) actual letter notifying me of my acceptance. I was simply given a “to do” list in sis.
This comes up every year. It’s just a quirk of SIS. I takes a long more than a month to get through the EA process.
Early Action (we haven’t had Early Decision at UVA in years) decisions come out in January because there are 16,000 of them. The last time we were able to notify in December, we had an early pool of about 2,500. There are two ways, that I can think of, to get decisions out in December:
Change the review so we don't read most of the applications that are submitted (which would probably mean having GPA and SAT/ACT thresholds) or only read parts of the application.
Double our staff.
I’m not comfortable with #1. I’d love to have #2 happen, but I don’t think the current way the University allocates funding allows for that.
Have you considered moving the application submission deadline up?..maybe to Oct 1? It would leave practically the same amount of time to review them before Jan 1 application deadlines close at other schools and it could potentially reduce the actual number of early applications to a more manageable size. The most prepared students would be submitting their applications rather than everyone rushing to submit early hoping it would give them an admission advantage.
Alternately, could there be two early action decision release dates? If there were one in Dec for applicants whose parents are alums or current UVA employees and a later one in Jan for all the other early applicants it could function as a “perk” for families who already have a relationship with the university. I’ve noticed a similar staggering of notifications for Questbridge finalist at other selective schools.
I appreciate that UVA has non-binding early action but wish it actually saved our family from having to go through the expense and stress of peppering universities with applications.
