BRO!! It's voluntary. It takes your personal time we all know that. That doesnt mean you stop providing your insights man! We've missed that. Good to see you around as usual.
The only insight I have at this point is that I'm not 100% convinced about nv's theory re: the new tracker and the Citizenship test. There's some correlation, not seeing enough causation to say it's valid just yet. For context, nv said :
From what i could gather from the forums, it seems that people are getting that email when an update is coming soon in a few days or week- either for a test invite, or fingerprint requests, or additional doc... I know a few people who submitted their application before I did, and have not received this email regarding the status tracker...
But again, trying to find patterns in or predict what the IRCC is doing is never really usefulll
In my case, I received the mail about the new tracker probably around the same time as everyone else did (June 18, 10:09 AM). Looking at the posts from the time that the first mention of that new tracker e-mail was put forth
here, it would seem I'm not the only person who also received that batch e-mail on June 18. Since we do not have a confirmation from everyone in November to conclusively say there's a pattern (which would be as difficult as getting routine updates from everyone on there.... heh
) it stands to reason that the notification about the new tracker has likely nothing to do with any impending update to people's statuses about the citizenship test, but what it most likely is, is just a simple go-live for what is the end of a production cycle, i.e. "Hey, we've made this system and we monitored for x amount of time, Product Marketing has finally decided to get off their ass and tell people about it because some of the applicants have already figured it out."
What we're seeing with a few applications
just happening to get their citizenship tests within a few days of this announcement, is a coincidence that it just happened to correlate to being a few days of that 'go live' e-mail. Hate to be a Debbie downer, but I'd like to see more data on 'gap in days between e-mail announcing tracker vs actually getting a test invite' before nv's theory is proven - my own gap at this point from receiving that e-mail is about 11 calendar days or about 7 working days).
As it stands, I see no reason for that e-mail to be correlated to a very specific step in the process considering they're both controlled by discrete systems. Should add that it's not all doom-and-gloom though - it would seem the GTA area is very popular for administration of the tests, at least looking at the number of people likely being serviced by the same VO that are getting the test invites. It also seems that the folks from September 2020 are on a tear as well. I think the original theory about there being something different about the way end of October-early November applicants are being handled (either a different lot/batch/method of processing) still, for now holds true - I'd be curious to see how October vs. November 2020 applicants hold up by comparison because October 2020 seems to be on the struggle bus right now, at least looking from the sheet. What is a bigger marker for progress though, still seems to be the location of applicants,
