mcorner

Every school does this differently, but for us we do things on a rolling basis. The most obvious decisions are made first. For instance we might reject a few hundred applications, then next week admit 20 students, and so on. We generally start in Feb, but it goes all the way to mid March. Admissions decisions are made by a committee of professors, so as you can imagine we do have a few other things to take care of The last decisions to get made are the ones on the edge of acceptance.... So, we made a few more decisions today, and I think within a week we will have everyone accepted, rejected, or wait listed. We are also offering wait listed students the option of coming for an MS degree without support, which I realize isn't exactly what people applied for, but best to give people whatever options we can. My personal feeling is that we won't be taking anyone off the wait list, but we won't know until somewhat after the April 15th deadline for the current admits to give us an answer. Again, thanks for applying, I know it is stressful.

Re: UMass CS.... Things were incredibly tough this year, we got 20% more apps than last year and the quality of students applying was up quite a lot. All of our initial admits are done at this point. We will wait list a few students, but the response for our visiting Friday was really great so I can't say how likely the wait list is going to be. We are getting the rest of the notifications sent out as quickly as we can. As for reading into admit dates from previous years, that is like reading tea-leaves The chair changes every year and does things a bit differently every time. I appreciate all the stress that goes into applying to various programs, I went through all of the same stressful moments myself not long ago. Let me know if you think there are things we did well or poorly---we are always looking to improve. Some things are unfortunately in the hands of the graduate school and out of the control of the department. Also, it may not help you now, but this is how I look at applications: http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/mcorner/cs-admissions I hope that you all find great homes in CS grad school! -Mark Corner