<p>I dont' think the new dean will greatly impact the randomness of acceptance to Stanford, especially for SCEA because for now he is trying to learn how Stanford approaches admissions. The most important thing is that the regional adcoms haven't changed. Those are the most important since they have known the region they read extremely well and will argue your case to the dean.</p>
<p>One thing that will be new to Stanford admission this year, according to the adcom that came to my information session, is that they will have verbal/court like adimssions where adcoms literally present an applicant and everyone talks about the applicant until a decision is made. In the past, the admissions process has been silent - your application was read and passed down the table to other adcoms as they wrote comments about you and the dean made the final decision.</p>
<p>Overall, Stanford admission is already so random that I cannot imagine how the new dean can make it more random...</p>