Logged in users no longer need to enter additional info to post comments on the blog. Additionally, a link to all prior articles has been added (just scroll to the bottom and click the link on the left hand side). In the future I’ll make a more sensible organization for older articles – but this will serve our needs for now.
If you didn’t catch it a few weeks back, My Chances got a mention in “The Juggle” portion of The Wallstreet Journal as a resource high school students are using to find colleges. In a post titled “How to Survive the College Admissions Frenzy,” My Chances was described as a site used to help students determine their odds of getting accepted at their top choice college.
If you’ve found My Chances useful, please let us know! James and I are working as hard as we can to make the site useful for you and to (hopefully) reduce some of the stress of the college search.
A few members were asking about the ability to note that they applied early and got deferred. Now, when you go to modify your app, you can mark a checkbox indicating deferred status. Good luck in the regular decision round!
My fellow students, our blog is now nearly completely integrated with the site. Please let me know if you run into any problems. Down the line I’ll be building out all the rest of features necessary so you don’t have to do annoying things like be redirected to our original wordpress location when you post a comment. For the time being, I guess we’ll all have to put up with the slight inconvenience.
This new integrated blog will allow for much more information to be added to the site (hopefully we’ll write up some useful articles along the way too!)
Happy holidays everyone 
Today we’ve rolled out the first iteration of two newsfeeds: one for the main page, and another for your “My Tools” page.
The mainpage newsfeed gives a summary of all of the goings-on from the last few minutes. It’ll let you know when someone joins the site, rates someone’s chances, rates an essay, is accepted at a college, or posts in the forums.
The personal (”My Tools”) newsfeed gives a more thorough summary of what’s been going on with the colleges on your list. When someone updates their status there, makes a new wall post, or predicts someone’s chances of admission at that school, you’ll hear about it.
You can direct any questions, comments, or concerns to the forum post on the same topic.
On each college page you’ll find a “Personalized Analysis” tab. This now shows you about a dozen graphs, breaking the numbers down by accepted/rejected/applying. Your own score range is highlighted. (Note: you have to be logged in to see the graphs.)
I’ve attached an example for those of you who aren’t logged in.
Anyone have any idea how the little scrolling “Audience Reaction” is measured? CNN has one trendline for independents, republicans, and democrats, and I’m not sure where they’re getting those numbers.
Update 1: Dennis left a comment with this CNN link which gives a partial answer: “Voters watch the debate from Columbus, Ohio, and give their reaction to the responses in real-time.” But how this is done is not clear; nor is it stated how they gauge who is republican, democratic, or independent (presumably self-identification).
Update 2: Ernanio points out “They have a bunch of potential voters from OHIO seated in a room with a dial thingamaging on their hands that when rotated can go from 0 – 100 to show how much they are liking the candidates intervention.”
Yesterday I updated the algorithm that spits out the probability (your chances of admission) for each person at each school. These new probabilities should be substantially more predictive than the old ones. (This change will not move <50% predictions above 50%, or vice versa. What has changed is only the scale; some rankings that were previously 56% might now be 75%, wholly dependent on which school we’re talking about.)
Previously, I had incorrectly converted between odds and probability. Now, I have changed the algorithm to correctly convert between the two. (Why this matters is idiosyncratic to how we process the data; suffice it to say that this matters.) In looking over the numbers at a couple of schools, this seems to have substantially increased the reliability of the predictions. It’s still not perfect, but it’s better.
To learn more about this, you can read some posts by ‘badass’ about this previous problem.
As ‘badass’ noted, a good model should, more or less, work like this:
Say that there are 25 people who each have a 20% chance of getting in. If the model isn’t great, then maybe 15 of those (60%) will get in, or maybe 1 of those (4%) will get in. If the model is great, then 1 in 5 (20%), or about 5 of those people, should get in. The models aren’t perfect, so this won’t be exactly the case, but now we’re much closer to that at many colleges.
(As an aside, you can see how a ‘perfect’ model will necessarily get predictions ‘wrong’. A perfect model that gives 10 people a 60% chance should be “wrong” on 4 of them: 4 of them should not get in. One that gives 10 people a 90% chance should be “wrong” on 1 of them. For the model-maker, these are the desired results.)
I’ve updated the script to allow you to add your IB scores. Ultimately, these may be used to improve predictions for students who have attended IB programs.
Now when you visit a school’s page, you’ll be able to click through to “Personalized Analysis”, which shows where you fall vs all admitted students (ever) and current applicants (for the next admissions cycle). Currently it is limited to GPA and SAT scores, but we plan to expand this to automatically show all of the categories that apply to you; i.e., if you listed an AP English Language score, we’ll graph that out for you.
Scatterplots: Now showing predictions, acceptance status | MyChances.net on New college admissions tool: Interactive flash scatterplots
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