On March 9, MyChances.net got a shout out from the LA Times. The original article, Anxious college hopefuls look for reassurance online, mainly focused on the “Chance Me” threads found on college admissions websites, including City-Data.com, CollegeConfidential.com, and MyChances.net. While the LA Times did tout the benefits students can receive from getting feedback from each other, the article took a mostly critical tone of students “chance me” threads in forums online, with a primary focus on negative postings found on CollegeConfidential.com as supporting evidence of how students can give hurtful feedback. The implication was that such feedback can be non-constructive and could harm a student’s ability to get into the colleges of their dreams – either by hurting their confidence or by discouraging them from applying to a college altogether.
The biggest problem with students chancing one another, the Times argued, was that there is an over-reliance on “the numbers” and too little emphasis is given to the student as a whole to determine if a student is truly a good fit for a college. Here at MyChances, James and I want to provide the community the means to support each other as best as possible. We provide both algorithm based estimates to help advise students of their odds of getting accepted, as well as the ability for the community to give feedback and “chance” their fellow students to provide further insight to applicants.
Our computer based predictions are based on actual real world statistics from actual applicants and their accepted/rejected information, not on personal whims (as appears is the case for many other college admissions “What are My Chances” tools out there on the web). Even so, our predictions by no means guarantee an accepted or rejected letter. This was part of the rationale for implementing our community predictions tool. Ideally, human “chancers” would look deeper into the profiles of each other to get an even more holistic view of how likely our members are of getting accepted or rejected by a college than even our algorithms are (with their thousands upon thousands of datapoints).
If you have any ideas about how we might improve our current system for providing feedback and advice for one another, please let us know. James and I strive to provide the best, most transparent (and statistics driven) college admissions resource available. As always, we’re open to any suggestions, comments, or criticisms you may have of our college analytics features, or anything else on MyChances.
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