Archive for the ‘MyChances.net’ Category
Friday, September 26th, 2008
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.”
Tags: debates, election, politics
Posted in MyChances.net | 153 Comments »
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
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.)
Tags: admissions, chances, odds, probabilities, statistics, update
Posted in MyChances.net, Status Update | 3 Comments »
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
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.
Tags: ib, international baccalaureate, standardized test
Posted in MyChances.net, Status Update | No Comments »
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
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.
Tags: admissions, analysis, college, personalized, standardized tests, statistics
Posted in MyChances.net, Status Update | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
As of today, when you visit a university’s page on this site, you’ll find a link to its map in the deep blue menu bar running along the top of the page. Fun things are in the works now that we’ve got the Google Maps working. For now, any suggestions? (If your university doesn’t have a map, it’s because we don’t have its address – send it our way and we’ll update the database.)
Tags: college, google, maps
Posted in MyChances.net, Status Update | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
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
Posted in MyChances.net, Status Update | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
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.
Tags: data, mit, mychances, prediction, privacy, security, survey
Posted in MyChances.net, Status Update | No Comments »
Monday, March 17th, 2008
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:
Tags: ajax, coding, javascript, prototype, scriptaculous
Posted in MyChances.net | No Comments »
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
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.
Tags: elite, gpa, middle, mychances, prediction, standardized tests
Posted in MyChances.net | 1 Comment »
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