Notes for future years from the 2010/2011 season
- Website issues:
- Fix the transcript problem – change the language so that students enter all their grades in chronological order.
- Add more terms to search process – make it easier to find unreviewed/uncompleted folders. Also, how do we search for numbers of reviews, number of completed reviews, etc.?
- Can we merge in recommender statistics from EECS previous years?
- Remember to get statistics from USAF in advance of GAC.
- The research areas are hard to decrypt. What is ACE?
- Can we allow users to hide the scores on the folder list page? (They scores are missing from the individual folder pages, but the list shows them. Can we get just: review completed, rather than scored.)
- Evaluation issues:
- Need to grow the GAC, make sure we get coverage in all areas. 6 and 2/2 GAC members is way too few.
- Determine better TOEFL cut-off process. Also compare success rates vs. TOEFL scores of matriculated grad students.
- Should we have a GRE cut-off like the TOEFL? No: stick to recommendations. Note for next year: GRE recommendation was not known by GAC. We should make sure we inform the faculty/GAC of GRE recommendation .
- Revisit the issue of the 3rd reviewer. Folders are getting a lot of review now. If a folder gets 3 GAC reviews and is AD, then it will get at least 2 from the sector, for a minimum of 5 reviews. Maybe in the future if the reviews conflict, it should go the sector to resolve the conflict. Dependent on size of GAC. Right answer is probably to stick to 3 reviews on conflicts, but have more people.
- Visit the issue of applicants who failed the quals twice. Are they allowed to apply, and how do we evaluate them fairly?
- We evaluate SM applicants differently from PhD applicants. Should we evaluate SM applicants who clearly only want an SM (e.g., USAF) differently from applicants who might go on to get a PhD? If not, we should make this explicit to reviewers. If so, we should enforce the difference at quals time.
- Can a faculty member force a fast-track even with low GAC scores? Suppose the low GAC scores were given by reviewers outside the area? Fast-track is a competitive advantage. If the candidate is admissible, and someone wants the fast-track, what's the argument against?
- Others
- Get Stanford open house date early. It turns out that our entire schedule can be affected by this.
Change aa-gac mailing list to be a mailman list with [AA-GAC] prepended to subject and also Wiki and applyweb URLs in footer.