A Chart

Ralph Stirling posted his latest statistics to APC. I noticed something near the bottom that I've never noticed before. A listing of how many people have reported their referrals. I know this is not a scientific sampling, but in the old "is the slowdown really because there are so many more dossiers" question, this might shed some light on it. So, I made a graph of his numbers. You can click on the image for a larger image to see what dates are involved. What this tells me is that the July 2004 group was HUGE. They got their referrals on January 6, 2005. They waited 6 months. The ones at the end of July only waited 5 months. Most of the months since July had about half as many. March 2005 is showing about 75% of what the huge July 2004 group was, and yet it took 2 months to do March, and they did that huge July group all at once. April is showing at less than half of the huge July group, but it's possible that many of the new referrals haven't posted their information yet, so I'll wait until the next statistics are run to see how that looks. Still, this would seem to disprove the claim that referrals are taking so long because there are so many more dossiers.