These instructions are for faculty members.
Start by going to:
https://odyssey.uwaterloo.ca/grad/faculty/
If you are not already logged in you will be prompted for your Quest/WatIAM userid and password.
Choose the term that you are interested in from the dropdown box.
Click "edit your research areas" and set whatever boxes you want. Only the applicants who indicated an interest in the research areas that you selected will show up.
Return to "Current Applications" and hit "Search...".
In "Faculty Interface" you can partition the applicants for a given term into different categories like "Interested", "Not interested", "Accepted", etc. But note that the "Faculty Interface" is purely for your convenience; the admissions director can't see that you might be interested in somebody. [See below about "waitlist"ing and "accept"ing applicants.]
The graduate admissions system is a finite state machine, more or less a Directed Acyclic Graph. Applications flow from New --> Hold --> Initial Review --> Circulate, etc (see FAQ below for details). Precisely the applications in "Circulate" are still available: these are the ones you want to look at.
The admissions director will typically circulate applications in batches, each batch with a deadline date (usually about 2-3 weeks in the future). For all applicants for which the deadline has passed and at least one faculty member has "accept"ed, the director will send out an email to sort out supervision (if necessary) and generate offers as soon as possible. Thus, applications in Circulate state with an Overdue status are available on a "first come first serve" basis.
Applications are ranked and commented on by a ranking subcommittee consisting of a subset of the graduate committee. A = top applicant, B+ = will probably get an entrance scholarship, B = ... you get the idea. Ranking is obviously subjective, but you probably want to check out the A's and B+'s for sure.
Click on an application number to bring up the "Main" page. The page includes information like locations and dates of past degrees. The "Uploaded" button will give a compilation PDF of all the application documents. Do not print out any part of this PDF, do not show it to anyone else, and be sure to delete the PDF from your system when you are finished looking at it.
The important thing on the "Main" page for an applicant are the "waitlist" and "accept" links.
If you want to ensure an offer doesn't go out without you being contacted first by the admissions director to have the chance to accept, you must "waitlist" an applicant. (And please un"waitlist" yourself as soon as you know you are no longer interested so as not to hold up offers.) Note that you can also waitlist an application that is in a state previous to Circulate, e.g., in New or Hold state. Doing so will alert the admissions director that somebody is interested in the application.
If you want to be included as a potential supervisor on the offer letter, change your status to "accept" and click (necessarily) the box "I am willing to ..." and then "Accept Applicant!".