Monday, December 6, 2010

When Will I Hear from Plan II? What's happening?

Plan II has finalized reviews on 35% of the applications we have received to date (12/6/10). We have mailed two groups of offers of admission (115 offers). About 2/3 of the Plan II Honors offers of admission remain to be made.

Every applicant who completes all the UT and Plan II application requirements (on-time!) receives a thorough review and full consideration for Plan II Honors Program admission.

However, Plan II Honors reviews applications in the order in which they become complete. If your application documents were not completed until the final week before the deadline, your application will be among those we review much later in this admission cycle. It’s likely to be February before we review your application and notify you of the Plan II admission decision if you did not have every document submitted before November 22, 2010.

If you submitted any application documents on or after November 28, and they do not yet reflect on the Status Check, you have to be patient. Those documents may not show up on Status Check for another week, perhaps a day or two more.

Because so many applicants wait until the last week to apply, UT Admissions receives about 20,000—25,000 PAPER DOCUMENTS (transcripts, letters of recommendation, supporting documents and even résumés and essays which can easily be submitted electronically) from the applicants who apply in the final week before the deadline. UT received more than 15,000 applications after Thanksgiving and about 75-80% of those had at least one paper document.

Every paper document must be logged in, assigned a unique identification number and then be digitally imaged. In the case of transcripts, the staff at UT Admissions must manually enter the senor year course schedule units and check for the State’s minimum and the UT minimum high school requirements. It’s a tedious process that is complicated by shear numbers.

As far as admission offers at this point in the process, early on we skim off the very top of our applicants and offer admission to a small number until we get through most of the applications (which will be mid-February at the earliest). Those who are not scored in the top ranks won’t here from us until February. It COULD conceivably still be good news: There are some who are right on the cusp, but we will wait until we’ve seen most of the applicant pool before we make a Plan II offer of admission. And, there will be some very strong applicants, who submitted after November 20 (or so) that we won't even review for the first review until mid-, even late-February.