This is exactly what I'm talking about. I know about the priority score (another VCU student kindly explained it to me earlier), but by the nature of rolling admissions, wouldn't it be advantageous to have our applications looked at earlier?
So assuming at this point a hypothetical OOS student receives an II, and the next available date is in Nov/Dec, this student may have already missed the first major acceptance date, meaning they only have 3 of the 4 pools left to be considered + WL. Assume, the same student receives the II a month from now, maybe they will have missed the first two dates, meaning they are only looked at for the last 2 pools/WL. Then it really doesn't matter if our priority score is high or low in the sense that we will still only be considered for the remaining acceptance pools. Unless you're telling me that they might not fill up all the cordoned seats for OOS students in prior pools and take OOS students who were interviewed after those acceptance dates.
The whole point of submitting early is to make sure that we are looked at as many times as possible (unless, of course, we are rejected outright). People have been complete since early/mid July who have files that haven't even been LOOKED at yet. We might be missing one or more of these 4 acceptance dates simply because we're OOS. That's what's really galling.
Of course, all this might be moot if OOS and IS acceptances are on completely different tracks and are considered for different seats and there's no overlap like you alluded to. If half of the class is "reserved" for OOS, I'd expect to see a little more movement for the OOS applications. I could count on my fingers the # of OOS II's that have been handed out to members on this forum. Something seems fishy to me. Maybe there'll be a giant batch of OOS II's soon. If that's the case, mea culpa, and please accept my apologies. It's still nonetheless frustrating to know that you can do everything early and have everything submitted early just to be passed over because you're OOS.
