In my mind, I imagine the committee, after evaluating hundreds of applications, simply skimming through the transcript to check if the student is an A student (as opposed to checking the quality of the courses taken, for example), judging the CV by the number of publications (as opposed to checking if they were first author, for example), and flipping to the keywords in a long letter of recommendation. I would hope, of course, that this doesn't occur (I would be surprised if it did).
Just how thorough is the process? Does the thoroughness of, e.g., the review of transcripts depend on the committee member, or is established in some manner how carefully it should be evaluated? And does this thoroughness persist after going through many applications?
