After Fadeke Agboke walked out of her Penn admissions interview two years ago, she thought her responses were dull and her chances of getting in were slim.
"I thought I was saying things they've heard before," she said.
But much to Agboke's surprise, her worries turned out to be superfluous - she got in.
Thousands of prospective students like Agboke, now a College sophomore, are still getting worked up about admissions interviews, but according to most experts and admissions officials, there's usually little need to be worried: For most schools, admissions interviews just don't seem to matter that much anymore.
"It's a 45-minute conversation with a complete stranger," said Rick Bischoff, the director of admissions at the California Institute of Technology, which has stopped offering interviews altogether. "Am I going to trust this, or a teacher recommendation who has known the student for a year?"
Faced with a growing applicant pool and limited resources, officials at many top schools say that, compared to the past generation of applicants, interviews are receiving less and less prominence in their decisions.
At Penn, for example, only about half of all applicants are even interviewed, and Interim Dean of Admissions Eric Kaplan said those who can't interview aren't hurt in the selection process.
Overall, 33 percent of schools said they gave no importance to an interview, up from 30 percent the year before, according to a survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Interviews ranked as the ninth-most valued criterion for admissions officials.
Most schools once required on-campus interviews with admissions officials, but as the number of applicants has skyrocketed, they have been replaced by more informal meetings with alumni.
Without a first-hand interview, admissions officials say, most interviews are now more of meet-and-greet sessions than real academic evaluations.
Sally Rubenstone, an admissions consultant at College Confidential, noted that her colleagues who served as alumni interviewers often see their top-rated applicants denied admission, while some applicants with weak alumni interviews receive acceptance letters.
"Interviews played a much larger and more significant role 20 to 35 years ago when applicant pools were smaller," said Dan Parish, associate director of admissions at Dartmouth College. "They were not as geographically diverse. It was just a different process in terms of scale and scope."
Still, while interviews may be a minor part of the process, anxiety continues to haunt students.
College sophomore YinYin Yu recounted a meeting with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which she was asked what she would do with a billion dollars in one day, and College freshman Linda Li recalled one experience with a Harvard University interviewer who asked her who she thought was the modern-day Aristotle.
Both applicants said they were dumbfounded by the questions and left the interviews dejected by their lack of quick thinking.
It seems that Li may be one of the few applicants who had valid concerns: Harvard is one of the few top schools who say that, as more and more students bring top SAT scores and perfect GPAs to the table, interviews are gaining importance.
"We are looking for qualities to animate," said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard.
More often, however, interviews are seen only as opportunities for students to expand on some topics mentioned in their applications or to ask questions about the school.
The best part about her interview, Agboke said, was that it "gave me some perspectives on the schools and what to prepare for in college."
