Admission Impossible?

CRUNCH TIME IN ADMISSIONS
THIRD IN A SERIES

ver in Credentials, a large, maze-like room divided by desks, tables and motorized shelves, about 20 people are hard at work. They are methodically sorting different parts of students' applications into single folders that will be distributed to readers participating in the long process of selecting who gets into Stanford.

Crunch time for the admission office begins the second week of January. This year, the folks in the Credentials room have a particularly grueling job ahead of them. By early January, a record 18,536 applications had poured into the office, and many more remained to be counted. This figure represents an 11 percent increase from the previous year's total of 16,842 applications. Preparing files for reading by admission officers is tedious work. Each piece of information, such as references, transcripts, standardized test scores and student essays, is checked to make sure it all belongs to the same applicant. Once this is done, the file passes on to the first reader, a senior staff member in the admission office, who sorts files into competitive and non-competitive piles and distributes them to the next readers.

Stanford offers two early admission rounds and a regular one. Although the deadlines differ, the mechanics of the reading process are essentially the same. Before files are read, a yellow workcard is inserted in front of each applicant's file. The workcard serves as the main means of communication between readers of the application.

Files that make the first cut (about half of the applicant pool) are distributed among the second readers, who painstakingly go through every document in the file; summarize the content on the workcard with a standard blue-ink pen;

Class of 2002 (Plain text)

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