I took 127 observations from data the forum reported in the past by people who applied for employment authorization and ran the following simple descriptive statistics.
It took on average 69.2 days to approve an AED from the ND. The fastest approved AED was in 29 days and the longest 131 days.
Now to check if there were any differences between 2005 and 2006 applications, I split the data into two, those applications with ND before 01/01/2006 and after.
2005 applications
1. 88 had application ND dates of 12/31/2005 or older;
2. They had on average an approval length of 67.7 days (with min days being 29 and max 131 days).
3. Median is 62 days.
2006 applications
1. 39 applications had ND after 01/01/2006;
2. It took on average 72.6 days for the CIS to approve applications. In this category the fastest was approved in 50 days, and slowest in 94.
3. Median is 72 days.
There we go folks. This information does not necessarily mean that USCIS has gotten inefficient with time (although it looks like that from the medians); actually I could argue that there isn’t that much of a statistical difference in the times of approval between these two years. Since the counting here was done from the ND, add 7 days to get an average from the RD.
I hope you find this useful & good news to me as this tells me that I am just under a month away from my AED.
Just to add salt to injury 