MyChances.net

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.

Welcome, CCers. After getting some feedback requesting more information, I’ve made a couple changes. First, you will now see the predicted probability of admission in your profile, instead of just a “yes” or “no”. Second, the accuracy of the model that is giving you the prediction will be shown just below, so that you can get a better sense of how much you want to trust the prediction.

Cheers,

James

For the past few weeks, predictions have been displayed on the member list for each school. Starting today, you can just visit your own college tracker to see the predictions at each of the schools on your list. That should save a few clicks. Also, if you hover your mouse over the prediction, extra details about that prediction appear in a box above the mouse.

Use this thread to give feedback, positive and negative.

Quick update - we’ve updated the system to display the predicted admissions outcome for each applicant on each school’s page. For example, if you visit the page of University of Illinois you’ll see that the model predicts admission to that school about 75% of the time.

At the University of Virginia, it predicts admission correctly about 62% of the time, while at the University of Pennsylvania, it’s right over 80% of the time.

What do you think of the accuracy, or of the predictions in general?

Check out the ‘My Tools’ link (only works if you’re logged in). On the page, you’ll now see a link to “Academic Matches”. This page will give you a list of the 10 schools that we think are the most closely matched to your academic characteristics.

Try it out and tell us what you think.

Today we’re rolling out a fun addition to MyChances.net: a currency system.

From now on, you’ll earn credits each time you post on this site. You can keep those credits in your wallet, or you can put them in the ‘bank’ and let them earn interest on an hourly basis.

With the credits, you can ‘buy’ shares of any of the colleges on this site. There are only 50 shares of each college to begin with, and each college’s share price is set based on its popularity. Some colleges are only 10 credits, while others already cost 300 credits per share.

You can buy colleges from the Shop, and you can sell them to other visitors at a price of your choosing by using the ‘Trade Centre’.

In the future, we’ll be adding new ways to earn credits and to spend them. We also plan on creating features that will only be available to people who own a share of college, just to spice things up a bit.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Hi everyone,

For the last several months MyChances.net has been on servers that have just been getting too slow. You’ve probably noticed that when browsing the site, you have to wait quite some time for pages to load. I’ve now switched the site to faster servers, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Because of the upgrade, you might notice some problems as I finish up the transition. If so, send feedback and let me know so I can resolve whatever comes up.

In the meantime, happy college hunting!

Today we’ve added a new option for you to browse by: Selectivity Ranking. As you might know by now, we’ve developed a formula to give each school a selectivity score based on how difficult it is to get into that school.

Now, we’ve ranked the colleges and given them Selectivity Rankings. You can ‘Browse Colleges’ by these rankings, showing you the most difficult to the least difficult schools to get into.