Do schools screen and not tell us?

[aixoise]

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Do schools screen and not tell us? Ie ask for our secondaries (we labor hard at essays and pay the 50-130 dollars) and then screen without reading secondaries? Or do they have to read our additional info?

Esp. interesting are schools that don't ask for essays

 

[Law2Doc]

Do schools screen and not tell us? Ie ask for our secondaries (we labor hard at essays and pay the 50-130 dollars) and then screen without reading secondaries? Or do they have to read our additional info?

Esp. interesting are schools that don't ask for essays

Absolutely. There are schools getting 10,000 applications. I promise you they do what they need to to be able to get it down to a manageable pile before they start seriously scrutinizing. Doesn't mean they won't look at every application, but it does mean that the first read is going to be a "quick and dirty" skim. So yes, in many cases you are going to be sending in your secondary fees for naught. Get used to the idea.

 

[Depakote]

Do schools screen and not tell us? Ie ask for our secondaries (we labor hard at essays and pay the 50-130 dollars) and then screen without reading secondaries? Or do they have to read our additional info?

Esp. interesting are schools that don't ask for essays

There are plenty of schools that have GPA/MCAT cutoffs they will apply to determine who's application they'll read. Many schools don't apply these before sending out a secondary application so if you send in that secondary fee but have weak stats compared to those of the school, there is a good chance they're just going to toss your app and cash the check.

You're taking this chance with any school that sends an unscreened secondary. The odds that you wont get looked at are better the lower your numbers are.

This happened to me with Georgetown, I got a rejection letter roughly 2 weeks after I mailed my secondary. Pretty impressive turn around.

Another possibility is that you'll have marginal numbers... you won't meet their rejection criteria but you won't get looked at because you just don't stand out enough. They'll look at batch after batch ahead of you until April rolls around and they've offered all their interviews. Then they reject the rest. This happened to me at a TON of schools.

But hey, got in interviews at enough and got in at the right school so I'm happy. You just need to realize you're playing a low percentage game if you've got marginal or low stats.