I sent Liz an email a while back (Feb. 5th) when I was worried that my application wouldn't be verified in time for the Feb. 15th deadline. Her response was this: "I would like to assure you that if you are a strong enough applicant to be admitted in our applicant pool this year, it is likely you would be admitted, regardless of when your application becomes verified and ready for review. If it becomes verified after the deadline, it will still be reviewed. It is possible it would be reviewed a bit later than other applications that became verified earlier, however you will still be considered. We also have a wait list process, so if your application is strong enough, it is possible you could be offered a place on the wait list, and then if a space opens up you could be admitted later on."
So while they claim to not be rolling admissions, applicants do become aware of decisions at different times/stages. From reading the forums last year, it appears the first group of acceptances from the Feb. 15th deadline should be sometime next week (Feb. 29-Mar. 4). Then, the next group of acceptances should probably be around 2 weeks from that, and so forth. Waitlists and rejections should be notified around the end of March, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will stop looking at incoming applications from new applicants. Again, if the applicant is strong enough, the date it comes in doesn't matter (as it shouldn't). At the end of the day, they want to bring the strongest applicants, regardless of when they send their application.
I'm sure they hope most applicants send their applications as early as they can, so that's pretty much why they have that Feb. 15th deadline. Though, they also recognize life happens, and they're not going to turn down someone who can bring something to their program because of something so trivial. As for extending the regular deadline to 5/15, I don't think it means exactly what you guys are thinking. That is just so applicants can still send in their applications on OTCAS until that date (since the Feb. 15th deadline blocked them from physically sending their apps). They have always been doing this, by the way. This is nothing new or out of the ordinary. One of my friends applied like a month later than the Feb. 15th deadline last year, and she was notified of her admittance sometime in April.
