Your logic doesn't hold up. If the status updates were just to update the application status to rejected, why would there be a second update to those applications on April 3rd? Furthermore, not all post December updates received a second April update. On top of that, many February update applicants also received the grfp. Most likely either the updates are meaningless or the updates signify being moved to the next round. The only thing is I'm also a December update applicant and in terms of pure academic numbers, I'm not sure what else I could've done. I have a near perfect GPA and GRE scores along with a pretty good amount of research for my discipline. I thought I would be able to get past the first round and then get kicked out on more subjective things like my research proposal.
