an idea about those schools that trickle out admissions slowly

[We regret to inform you]

I'm sure this has been suggested before, so maybe someone can confirm or deny this is how it works for schools that trickle out their decisions over time:

Say a school gets 30 applications and they have 10 spots. They first order all the applications in the order they would like to accept them. #1 is the best, #30 is the worst. They then send out emails to #1 and #30. One acceptance, one rejection. Then they email #2 and #29 - one acceptance and one rejection... etc. So as they slowly work their way towards the middle of the list they will have gotten back some responses from their acceptance offers. So if someone declines an acceptance they then have a spot for person #11 before they get to that person on the list.

I certainly hope this is roughly how it's done. My dream school is trickling out decisions both positive and negative and i haven't heard anything yet. So hopefully i'm at least somewhere in the middle and still have a shot.

[DorindaAfterThyrsis]

It's an interesting theory, and I wholeheartedly approve of all theories that allow me to continue to hope that my yesses are coming, despite all evidence to the contrary.

[AlisN1dlan]

Interesting but I'm not entirely sure it makes sense. What would a school have to gain except a cohort full of the weakest applicants who applied? Those at the top of the list would have had the strongest applications - and they would certainly have applied to multiple great schools - perhaps just as likely to reject as to accept. Im waiting on a "trickle" school: there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it's methods. But I really suspect there's an "unofficial" wait list which gets offers from the top down. Who knows though.

[We regret to inform you]

Interesting but I'm not entirely sure it makes sense. What would a school have to gain except a cohort full of the weakest applicants who applied? Those at the top of the list would have had the strongest applications - and they would certainly have applied to multiple great schools - perhaps just as likely to reject as to accept. Im waiting on a "trickle" school: there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it's methods. But I really suspect there's an "unofficial" wait list which gets offers from the top down. Who knows though.

huh?

by trickling out acceptances to the top people and rejections to the bottom people, they slowly zoom in on the middle people whom they don't know if they have the space for until the top acceptances reply back.

[quick1]

Since I've already been rejected from half the schools I applied to, I'd like this theory to be true.

[lolnumbers]

you have to look at the type of department, and how they pay (or don't pay) their students. in engineering or the hard sciences decisions trickle out b/c getting accepted normally depends on whether or not a professor is willing to make a financial offer, and those decisions are made individually by the professor and pay little attention to a departmental timeline.

if you're in planetary science, more than likely individual professors are waiting to see what grants come through before they decide if they're even pursuing a new student, and then are recruiting individual students. point being, if a place has sent out some rejections, but you have not yet been rejected, the likely reason is that you are on some professor's short list, but they either prefer another student or do not yet know if they have money to make you an offer. the grant cycle is not the same as the student application cycle though, so these types of decisions often get dragged out to the very end of the application period.

[PhDreams]

So, if they have 10 spots do you suppose that they would accept 10 and then waitlist 5? Or do you think they would just accept 15 and hope that they all dont accept your offer?