Schools with non-rolling admissions

[bigbaubdi]

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I was curious how non-rolling schools such as Harvard and Penn worked - some people have told me that the adcoms meet after a batch of interviews and give the applicants "ratings." Then sometime in February, the adcoms rank all of the interviewees and then set some sort of cut off for acceptance, waitlist and rejection. Is this accurate?

 

[lessismoe]

U of Hawaii is non-rolling, and how it works there is:

After interviews, interviewers write up a report of some sort about the interview. This is added to your file. Then, in Feb, the ad com meets and spends ~20 min discussing/reviewing your file in its entirety. After that, all members vote about where you rank on some arbitrary scale (ie- one to ten). The results are averaged.

The averaged scores of applicants are ranked from highest to lowest, and the top applicants are offered enough slots to fill the class.

I have no idea about Harvard or Penn, but I imagine its similar.

 

[bigbaubdi]

Hmmm... does this mean that people who interview late are more likely to be remembered than people who interviewed early?