sidevans

Agreed. However, many schools that send out acceptances over a period of a few days do so consistently from year to year. Just to look at Minnesota's behavior from the past three years: 2014 - First acceptance 1/31, last acceptance 1/31, first wait list 1/31, last wait list 1/31 2013 - First (and only) acceptance 2/1, first wait list 2/11, last wait list 2/11 2012 - First (and only) acceptance 1/27, first wait list 2/6, last wait list 2/6 It's a bit hard to say how their acceptances work since there have been so few posted over the last few years. What we can say is that there's never been a year in which different initial acceptances from Minnesota were reported to come on different days. This isn't conclusive, of course. Minnesota also appears to use an enormous wait list, though it seems to have been scaled back a bit last year. They also have a fairly small number of PhD students - 25 current, by my count. So it's possible they only look for 4 or 5 to enter each year. It's hard to tell whether they may be still sending out acceptances (as you note, this is hard to judge or confirm with any certainty), but it certainly looks like they haven't yet released a wait list. It also seems that, many years (but not 2014), 1 or 2 people get in off the wait list.

Minnesota and Berkeley appear to have a pretty similar procedure, judging by past years: they send out wait list notifications after finishing with acceptances. There's often a bigger gap between these with Minnesota than with Berkeley. So while I don't think we can conclude that Minnesota is done sending out acceptances yet, the Berkeley wait list likely means that they are finished. It is a bit surprising to only see two Berkeley acceptances, but say they accept 10 applicants initially: 2 notifications on the results page, 2 or 3 that are a little slow at uploading them, and 5 or 6 that don't use the gradcafe. That doesn't sound too crazy to me.

Of the likely candidates to release this week that haven't yet: UNC has released on a Wednesday (2014), Friday (2013), and Friday (2012), so there's still a decent chance that they'll release this week University of Wisconsin, Madison has released on a Tuesday (2014), Wednesday (2013), and Wednesday (2012), so they're still a possibility for this week (though they have some variability - they didn't release until the 16th in 2013) UC Riverside has released on a Thursday (2014), Friday (2013), and Friday (2012), so I think there's a good chance they'll release today or tomorrow UChicago always releases on a Friday, and it hasn't been any later than the 10th, so I suspect they'll release tomorrow UC Irvine has released on a Thursday (2014), Saturday (2013), and Tuesday (2012), so they're pretty random in terms of day of the week, but the latest they've released is the 10th, so there's still a good chance they'll release today or tomorrow University of Connecticut, Storrs has released on a Thursday each of the past three years, but with a lot of variability for date, so if they don't release today, we'll probably have to wait at least another week University of Indiana, Bloomington has released on a Thursday (2014), Wednesday (2013), and Friday (2012), so they're also pretty random in terms of days of the week, but they were about two weeks later than usual last year, so it's hard to say whether that was anomalous or a new trend So the data's a bit hard to interpret, but I'd expect Riverside and UChicago to release today or tomorrow, as well as a couple of the others. Additionally, there have been a number of surprises this year from schools releasing earlier than expected, so there may be a few I didn't list that also release over the next few days.

One of the most important things to remember in assessing one's chances is that philosophy professors have wildly different opinions on which elements of an application are important, and which are close to useless. So, some professors will think that GRE scores are crucial, while others don't even look at them. Same goes for grades - some professors won't want to admit anyone who has blemishes on his/her transcript, while others think they're highly relative. It's basically impossible to know the preferences of the professor(s) who will end up reading your application at any given department. With that in mind, one's strategy should be to make all elements of one's application as good as possible, to try and look good in the eyes of professors with diverse preferences. However, (and this goes especially for grades and GREs) if you do have a weak part of your application, your application does have a chance of being read by someone who doesn't care about that part. This partially explains how applicants can get admitted to some higher ranked departments and rejected from some lower ones. There's just a high level of randomness. This is to say that I'm in agreement with both MattDest and Ian - many professors will care about grades, so having weak grades hurts the strength of one's application. Nonetheless, your application very well may be read by someone who doesn't care very much about a few bad grades, so having bad grades in no way ruins one's chances completely.

It's certainly not ideal, but I don't think it will kill your chances. It will help if you have really great GRE scores - often, a deficit in either GRE or GPA can be offset by outstanding marks in the other. And since the writing sample and letters of recommendation are the truly crucial parts of an application, you should should make those absolutely as good as possible. It might help if your letter writers address the difficulty of the courses you got B's in, though I would refrain from doing so in your personal statement. That said, admissions committees do look for success in graduate-level coursework as an indicator of how well you'll do in their programs. Overall, yes, it will likely hurt your chances, but no, you're not already doomed.

I wanted to let people here know about something I wrote on my blog last week: I have reason to believe that UChicago is finalizing their admissions decisions tonight, and will likely release acceptances tomorrow via email. This is a week earlier than I originally predicted. Of course, if they don't release acceptances tomorrow, they likely will not release until next Friday, since they have released on a Friday each of the past three years. Also worth noting is that UChicago does not have a wait list, so it's one round of acceptances and then nothing more for the rest of the admissions season.

True. It does take professors some time to send out emails, especially if they're personalized. So there is still some hope. But I would expect all admitted students to receive an email by the end of this week, if not sooner (excluding those who are later admitted off the wait list).

Can anyone confirm the Florida State acceptance? I'd like to post a notification on the blog, but it's significantly earlier than their acceptance dates for the past two years, and is reported to be within a day of the two Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy acceptances from FSU, which aren't from the philosophy department.

Yep, Ian Faircloud's blog has historical data here. I didn't republish that data on my blog, but perhaps I could include a link on the predictions page.

Thanks for noticing that! No particular reason other than that I was using Ian's data, which didn't include it. I've now added in a prediction for UConn at February 5. It's a bit hard to predict, since they've had pretty high variation - January 23 in 2014, February 7 in 2013, and February 23 in 2012. One thing that's worth noting is that each of these dates is a Thursday, so I'm more confident that they'll release on a Thursday than that it'll be right around February 5, and I especially wouldn't be surprised if it were earlier (since that seems to be their trend). Maybe the variation can be explained in terms of changes in their application deadline, but that data's hard to come by. Anyway, hope this helps.

Hello again, Release date predictions are now up here. And I've included some comments on my methodology here. I also want to mention that Ian Faircloud will be a contributor on the site. He's already been a tremendous help, and I think all of us in the philosophy applicant community will benefit from whatever he's able to add. So, many thanks to him.

Hello everyone, I'll be attempting to do something like what Ian did last year in terms of a frequently updated blog tracking which schools have notified applicants of which admissions status. Granted, I'm just putting together the site now, so it likely won't be as polished as Ian's site. But I have a fair bit of time to commit to regularly updating the site, and I'm very much invested in the process since I'm applying for fall 2015. So hopefully some of you will find my site helpful, even though it's quite bare-bones at the moment. It's at http://philosophyadmissions.wordpress.com/. I'd also like to note that I don't intend for this to be my personal site. Ideally, I'd like to pass the reigns to someone else next year, such that the site becomes something like a community-owned resource for the philosophy applicant community. I'd also like to do another round of the Philosophy Applicant Survey after results are in, and may try to get some help on that front from other members of the Grad Cafe community. That's all for now; I'll be on these forums as much as possible throughout the whole process. Good luck to everyone.