MyChances.net

Today, I finally put the finishing touches on a form I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks now. It’s the page where you create your college profile. This is an important page, because the computer largely bases its predictions on the information you give it here. Starting today, you’ll be asked to indicate which high school you’re attending (out of a list of about 35,000). If it’s not there, you can easily add it without leaving the page. And for privacy’s sake, you’re invited to hide your high school information before you’re even asked for it.

The benefit in disclosing where you go to high school is that it will allow for better predictions.  Unless you think that it’s an accident that Stuyvesant and Andover flood the Ivies with their graduates every year, you’ll probably agree with me that high school “strength” is a fair indicator of future college acceptance. Well, even if you don’t agree with me, we’ll be testing this hypothesis together over the next few weeks.

Are there any patterns that you think will jump out? How do you think your your high school will compare?

I was looking for a recursive str_replace in php tonight and I couldn’t find any, so I wrote one. This takes the exact same parameters as str_replace, in the same order. It recursively searches the $subject, replacing $search with $replace, while keeping track of how many times ($count) it has replaced the $subject.

<?
function str_replace_recursive($search,$replace,$subject,&$count=0){
	$newcount=$count;
	$subject = str_replace($search,$replace,$subject,$newcount);
	$count = $newcount+$count;
	if(!(strpos($subject,$search)===false)){
		return str_replace_recursive($search,$replace,$subject,$count);
	}else{
		return $subject;
	}
}
?>

Example:

$count=0;
$string = "; ; I; am; ; ; ; ; become; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;";
string = str_replace_recursive('; ;',';',$string,$count);

echo $string;
echo $count;

Outputs:
string --> I; am; become;
count --> 12

(Note that this is not the best code to use for this situation; can you write a faster solution to this example using only plain vanilla str_replace?)

I’m rolling out a big survey update today that should simplify and improve the data that gets collected; as always, this will help with predictions. Expect this around 9:00pm Pacific on Tuesday; I’ll make another note here when the update gets “pushed” out.

Later this week, I’ll be clarifying the privacy policy and beefing up privacy safeguards.

By the way, it looks like MIT has been sending out rejection letters; let me know if you’ve seen any MIT acceptances.

I’ve been updating the site to use Prototype.js, an Ajax framework. In the process, I was looking for some demo code. Scriptaculous, as they often do, came to the rescue. However, they have a bug on their page that deals with the Prototype Ajax.Updater. They say:

Read the rest of this entry »

Other bloggers have been discussing which schools place the most emphasis on GPA.

At Mychances.net, at least, it’s our experience that the schools at the “top” are the ones most likely to take into account more than GPA and scores. These are the ones most difficult to “chance” based on numbers alone. The ones in the middle of the pack tend to be pretty well predictable based on GPA, standardized tests, and little more than that.

Today the site has reached an important milestone: there are now 10,000 registered members. Thanks for your interest in this site and for your contributions to one another.

Some communities become more distant and less useful as their numbers grow. I think our community is quite the opposite; as more people join and contribute, we’ll all gain better insight into the daunting process of college admissions. And I’m working on a few tools right now to help keep the community interconnected, even as the site grows larger.

Until soon.

I’ll be taking a break from the site for the next 30 days, while I prepare for some big exams (I’m on my neuro block at Hopkins Med right now). In the meanwhile, please feel free to leave suggestions or feature-requests in the comments below. Alternatively, you can always message or email me. Good luck with your apps!

New feature: community predictions. These allow you to rate fellow members’ chances at any school where they have not yet received a decision (acceptance/waitlist/rejection), and others can rate you.

In short time, I’ll be developing an “application” to go with this. As things stand, the plan is to display a profile based on how often you rate others profiles. The probability that someone will be taken to your profile is determined based on how many profiles you have rated. The system should, therefore, reward you for rating others’ profiles. There may be different incentive structures added on later.

I’ve implemented some survey questions to try to begin making the predictions more accurate at some of the tougher schools. If you’re creating a new account, you’ll automatically be asked 7 easy questions (no writing involved). If you’ve already got an account, why not update your account so the algorithm can improve our predictions for you?

(Note - the prediction algorithm is not using this info yet because the site just started collecting it, but this will change in the weeks to come.)

Today I updated the prediction models for the first time in a few months, so you might see a shuffle in your predictions as the model updates. We’re still working with a relatively small sample size in the low thousands. As the site grows, the predictions will become less labile.

As things currently stand, the site is, on the whole 90% accurate (see the bottom piece of data on that page).

Also, the Admission Game has been updated to properly take into account the predictions made by each school’s model.