Does anyone know what the criteria was for interview calls and to expect in them? I ask because the Fall priority deadline is on 15th Feb and my application isn't complete yet since one recommendation letter is pending, and I received the interview invitation a few hours ago.

To the poster below - about the rant on CGPA. Exactly what i was discussing with a friend. In India, some of the IITs do give 9.8-9.9 level cgpas, and in some IITs, you can't score above 9.2-9.3 in a department. At VIT, it was possible to get 9.7-9.8 in a BTech CSE, and in my batch of MS Software Engg, it wasn't possible to score beyond 9.2 tops because the professors were stingy. University of Pune i heard has people who are toppers have only 80% as their maximum. Wisconsin adcom probably filtered through the 2000 applications with a generic GRE>325, GPA>9.5 and arrived at a list of 200-300 people from whom they would have admitted around 30-50 people with full funding and 30-50 with partial funding, and 30-50 with no funding, rejecting everyone else. Since the total number of applicants is 2000, it's not hard to imagine there are a lot of applicants with over 9.5 cgpa. Of course, this is not the only college that does this. They are simply oblivious to how a particular college does grading in India and just looks at CGPA. This is also the reason why some European students have a hard time getting into top US colleges as in some European colleges, it's hard to score above 5 on a scale of 6 which is like 8.3 on a scale of 10, which isn't looked very favorably, while in Europe, that would be a mindblowing score. Anyway - this is just the nature of the admissions process. You'll get a better college!

Central admission. No interview. They asked to contact the department for funding.

Generic rejection mail. No waitlist since Wisconsin Madison doesn't waitlist.

International undergrad at UBC, research experience but no publication. Got email from POI, haven't received official email. Regular track

GPA is all that seems to matter.. I have seen multiple "insert embarrassingly high 9.xx GPA" from shitty Tier-3 colleges in India getting admitted. I have a decent GPA from a Tier-1 college (With relative grading, it is actually hard for us to score >9 GPA - they don't distribute those like peanuts).. UW-M was a great college and hence my bitter rant.. Anyways, nice to have some closure..

To the Columbia post below: I received an acceptance email from the department. On my application portal, the admission decision has changed to "Accepted to Ph.D. program in Computer Science".

Rejection by email. Nothing specific mentioned other than that there were over 2000 applications.

After CMU, Madison too... :(

To the McGill Poster below, Congratulations! Can you share stats like your score, GPA and location of college?

First reject.

Interviewed last night, got official offer this morning. PI said there are 1200 applicants for the ms program this year...

VIT University, Vellore. MS in Software Engineering (5 yr integrated) 9.35/10 GPA ; University 3rd rank ; Undergrad thesis research in ML-Neural Nets ; six other relevant projects ; 2.5 years work-ex at PayPal India Risk Product team as SDE (quit as SDE-2) and 1.5 years of entrepreneurship in Data driven Marketing research. GRE (169Q, 157V, 5.0AWA) and TOEFL 113. Applied for thesis MS (with possibility of PhD) track with professors of interest being Dr. Dimitris, and Dr. Shivram Venkataraman. Rejected. 3 down. 7 to go.