Here's part of a mass email i received back in december from my Far West Admissions Officer that i think would be useful for this thread:
"About 550 slots in the class will be filled by the congressional/senatorial/VP "vacancy winners." Those are the candidates that are either designated by the Member Of Congress as their Principal nominee (about 20% of MOCs do it this way, but remember that even a P-NOM won’t save you from being academically, physically, or medically DQed) or that we determine to be the best-qualified candidate out of the entire unranked (competing) list of nominees provided by the MOC… they can give us up to 10 names for each vacancy. If competition is tight on that unranked list, we may have to wait all the way up until the file completion deadline before determining the vacancy winner in order to give all the candidates an equal opportunity to make their files as competitive as possible. THIS IS ONE POSSIBLE REASON WHY EVEN THOUGH YOUR FILE IS COMPLETE, YOU ARE FULLY QUALIFIED, AND YOU HAVE A NOMINATION, YOU MAY STILL HAVE TO WAIT A WHILE FOR AN OFFER. You will get the “National Waiting List” letter while we wait for the files of all candidates on that congressional list to fully resolve… this doesn’t mean that you might not wind up winning that vacancy and getting the offer, only that you may have to wait longer to find out.
Another 300 slots in the class will be filled by service-connected (aka "Presidential") nominees. 100 son/daughter of career military, some son/daughter of deceased on duty / 100% disabled vet / MOH winners, up to 85 active duty and 85 reserve component nominees, and up to 20 Jr. or Sr. ROTC nominees. Just like the congressional nominations, there are more nominees than there are slots for them to fill. For example, several hundred sons/daughters of career military personnel and ROTC cadets receive those nominations each year… far more than the 120 slots available between those two categories.
That means that the remaining 350 slots in a 1,200 person class come from the National Waiting List... those fully qualified candidates who received a congressional or service-connected nomination but were NOT the vacancy winner. THIS is where our required-by-law class composition goals come into play: Scholar, Leader, Div I Athlete, Female, Soldier, or Minority (African American, Hispanic, or Native American), and this is how the admissions committee "fine-tunes" the class. Every candidate on the NWL has been qualified, so they can choose the candidates that help West Point to meet those goals or the candidates whose overall file strength is above a certain level. The committee will say, at certain points throughout the cycle, "Give us all the fully qualified & nominated candidates with a file strength of XXXX who fall under the YYYYYYY class composition goal. You have ZZ days to send them forward to the committee." This is already happening. Those X, Y, and Z values will change throughout the cycle, usually getting MORE stringent as the class fills up, so if you were waiting until the last minute to take your fitness assessment or still working on getting Q-MED, you might miss the boat!
If you are on the National Waiting List, you must exercise PATIENCE. It could take a week to get an offer, or a month, or it could not come at all. Many folks currently on the NWL are sitting just below a candidate who will win the vacancy IF that candidate gets medically qualified or IF they accept their offer of admission or IF they pass their CFA retest, etc. If that candidate declines or gets DQed, then we start going down the list and MAY get to you. Asking me where you are on the district, state, or national list (I cannot tell you) and/or asking me “what are my chances” (I won’t know until at least the file completion deadline) will not change anything and will not get a response. Rest assured, however, that I am constantly reviewing EVERY ONE of my 84 congressional districts and 20 senatorial slates to see what’s going on with every candidate… communicating with them and angling for offers at every opportunity both leading up to and following the file completion deadline.
By late March to mid-April, we will have resolved almost all of the congressional and service-connected vacancies, and selected the remainder of our candidates from the NWL. A handful of offers will come out as late as June, but those are exceptional cases. Sometime in the middle of April you should receive final word about whether or not you will be coming off of the NWL. If not, you will receive a letter telling you that you were considered fully Qualified for admission, but Not Selected. In other words, you are “QNS.” IF you applied for an ROTC scholarship, and IF you selected that "ROTC consideration" checkbox on our application, we will automatically notify them that you are on our QNS list. ROTC will hold an additional scholarship board and review all of our "QNS" names, picking many of you up if you haven’t already received word from them.
I hope that this summary helps provide you with some clarity and valuable information on what lies ahead for you in the admissions process. For those of you receiving this email who have already been offered admission, please make your decision as SOON as you can… other candidates are waiting for your reply with bated breath, whether they know it or not! For those of you who have accepted your offers, CONGRATULATIONS! Stay out of trouble, keep your grades up, and don’t get medically broken. I see offers withdrawn every year for these issues and more… don’t be the candidate who suffers from a “self-inflicted wound” like that!"