Being marked complete at schools despite missing a rec letter?

[jmtfcs]

So this has been happening to me and I'm curious about what it means. Is this because I've met the minimum requirements for LORs (I have 3) for these schools and they don't care about the last one? Or will they wait until the last one is in anyway? Really just curious if this last letter is holding me up and I should just mark it as no longer being sent or if it's not making a difference.

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[jmtfcs]

All depends on how the school chooses to do their processing metric: all LORs that you have listed or the school's minimum. With the increasing number of applications per school and workload this presents, many schools are choosing to mark files complete when the minimum number of letters are received. This allows the file to go to the evaluation queue for the next stage of processing. It is still very early in the process so I would suggest if the missing letter is important, wait for it

I see, thanks for your response!

Two quick follow-up questions:

1) for schools where this letter is beyond the minimum, am I truly complete -- like can I still interview before it's in?

2) when is too late? At what point should I just give up on the letter?