Inside a Stanford admissions file

When Rogers Mathews ’27 first submitted a request to view his Stanford admissions files, he expected to receive a document padded with comments from admission officers about his application.

Instead, he was met with a page that contained his name, evaluative categories and corresponding numbers.

The ability for students to review their admissions files is granted by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a federal law that protects students’ educational records at all universities, including Stanford. Through the law, students and alumni can request to review their own academic records maintained by the University, including admissions files.

While some documents and comments are not guaranteed, many students have looked to the requests as a way to understand why they were admitted to Stanford.

Mathews is one of these students, hearing about the form through fellow frosh who were eager to answer the question of why Stanford chose them. 

“I think there’s like a level of mystique around admissions, and there’s not a whole lot of transparency about that,” Mathews said. Especially coming from a competitive high school, he wanted to know why he was admitted to Stanford compared to those who, “on paper… seem so much more competitive.”

Others, like Andrea Liao ’25, were more “curious to learn about how [her] admissions officers were perceiving [her], to put it plainly,” Liao said.

Liao described the process of accessing the files as straightforward, following steps that her friends prescribed: Filling out the request form and going to the appointment location on time. Since no electronic recording of the files was permitted, Liao quickly scribbled her notes down in her notebook, copying as much as she could in the time allowed.

Yifei Cheng ’26 had a different experience. He waited “almost two months” for his request to be accepted, disappointed to see that half of his file was, seemingly due to error, “crossed with highlighter,” and thus largely illegible. 

Both Cheng and Liao saw similar content on their application, seeing information such as admission officers’ comments on their application essays and the initial decision the admission officers made about their applications.

However, this variety of information was unavailable to Mathews. This year, there is a changing trend on what is accessible on the admissions files, limiting students only to view evaluative categories, numbers, and a few adjectives to describe the student. Other comments are still made by admissions officers, but unavailable to students.

The categories on the files for frosh and upperclassmen remained similar, including scores on categories named “HSR,” “EC,” “IV” and more. While there are no clear definitions of these categories, many speculate their respective contexts as “high school record,” “extracurriculars,” and “intellectual vitality.” Each category is evaluated by two admission officers, offering a glimpse into their thought processes.

When asked about the change in revealed information, University spokeswoman Dee Mostofi wrote that “[Stanford’s] standard practice is to expunge evaluative comments from student records before matriculation.”

Cheng found this shift in available information “unfortunate.” Cheng said he did not “understand what [Stanford was] trying to hide.”

“It wasn’t that helpful in the grand scheme of things,” Mathews said. “Just to see yourself reduced to a set of numbers and the proctor in the room can’t even help you decipher anything.”

Ultimately, Mathews feels as though the lack of comments on his admissions files is a loss for his year.

“I definitely don’t think that [Stanford] did the Class of ’27 justice by withholding information from us,” Mathews said. “You know, you get in, you want to see what made you stand out.”

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