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?

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.

Our Google-enhanced site search (at the top right corner of each page) has been nonfunctional for the last few days, but it’s fixed now.

It might come in handy if you’re doing something like searching for ‘UCLA’ but can’t find it in our college list because our built-in search just isn’t that good yet (but we’re working on that).

Example:
Go to ‘Browse Colleges’
Search for ‘UCLA’
Results: 0

Now type UCLA into the search at the top of this page, and you’ll be whisked to the right place.

As of today, we’ve introduced the +/- symbols next to each university’s name on the university profile pages. This allows you to add and remove schools from your list in even more simply than before. Try it out and tell us what you think.

I’m happy to introduce College Comparisons to MyChances.net. We’ve always had a list of ‘Peer Schools’ - schools that share many applicants with School X (whichever school you’re browsing). We’ve gone beyond that now, though. When you visit School X’s page, you’ll be able to see:

* Which schools students prefer more (e.g., if students get into both School X and School Y, they commonly attend School Y)
* Which schools students consider equally (e.g., if students get into both School X and School Y, they sometimes go to one and sometimes to the other)
* Which schools students prefer less (e.g., if students get into both School X and School Y, they commonly attend School X)

Hopefully this will help you broaden you college search and discover some new schools that you weren’t previously aware of. As always, good luck with the application process!

We’ve got two new tools for you to use on the site now.  The first is “Browse Colleges”.  With this tool, you can browse (and search) through the list of thousands of colleges to see stats on your favorite schools.

The second tool we have for you is “Search Profiles”.  This allows you to search through the profiles of current members to see how you compare.

To access both of these tools, click on the “College Menu”.  As always, if you have any questions or comments, make a comment on this blog or a note in the forums.