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?
Tags: college, high school, prediction, privacy, ranking, statistics
Very interesting. However, these days it seems like a search for my HS in the “Search Profiles” page yields no results. What happened? I like having a quick way to access my friends’ profiles..
When we started tracking HS’es via a relational table instead of just by freetext, this feature essentially stopped working. Let me play around with it and see if I can’t get it back up soon. It shouldn’t be difficult at all.
@Will: I’ve fixed this. Sorry for the delay. You can now search by High Schools’ names again.