No one who does not sit on the board can tell you. A file passes through gates: training, institutional permissions, completeness, the reading, the board's notes, and the letter. What you influence is how many passes each gate takes, not the schedule behind it.
Why will we not print a number?
Three reasons, and all of them would still hold if we had one.
The first is that we do not control the queue. Neither does any consultant, and any page that promises you an approval by a certain point is selling you something it cannot deliver. The second is that most of the waiting in a capstone file happens before the board ever sees it, at gates held by other people entirely: the person at your facility with authority to sign, the office that must clear the use of institutional data, the training record that has not been completed. The third is that a published figure ages badly. Volume shifts, processes change, and a number repeated on a consultant's site outlives the reality it described.
WGU's own policy page carries WGU's own statements about how its review runs, and that page, in its current version, is the place to read them. Read it there rather than trusting a second-hand summary, this one included, and treat what the board itself tells you about your specific file as the only figure that governs your planning.
Two words worth defining: gate, pass
A gate is a condition that has to be satisfied before your file moves at all. Gates ignore effort and urgency alike. They answer only to the specific thing they await, and until that thing exists, nothing downstream happens however much of the file is finished.
A pass is one complete trip through a reader, ending either in movement or in notes coming back to you. Passes are the part you genuinely influence. A file whose documents contradict each other takes more passes than the same project described consistently, and every extra pass costs the whole cycle again, not merely the lines you got wrong.
You cannot make a gate open sooner. You can stop your own file from being the reason it stays shut.
What are the gates, in order?
| Gate | What opens it | What holds it shut |
|---|---|---|
| Training | The completed human-subjects training record WGU's current handbook or IRB portal expects | Started late, or the wrong set of modules completed |
| Institutional permission | For data about WGU's own population, approval from the Vice President of Institutional Research or a designee, before the IRB submission | Discovering the requirement after the application is written |
| Site permission | A letter on the facility's letterhead from someone with authority to grant the access you need | Requesting it last; sending a draft the signer must rewrite; asking the wrong person |
| Completeness | A submission with every attachment the portal asks for, in the form it asks for | A missing instrument, an unsigned document, a form from a superseded template |
| The reading | The office establishing what the project is: not human-subjects research, exempt, or a review path | An aim statement written in one register and a design built in another |
| Notes and answers | Each note answered specifically, with every affected document revised to match | Answering the easy notes, arguing with the hard ones, or revising one page and not its siblings |
| The letter | The board issuing its decision and any conditions attached to it | Nothing you can act on. This one is the board's alone |
Two features of that ladder matter more than the order. The gates are not all sequential: training and the site letter can be worked while the application is being drafted, and the institutional permission for university data must be finished before the submission rather than alongside it. And most files that stall stall at a gate the board does not control. The full walk, station by station, is set out in how it works.