We have rolled out our interactive flash scatterplots (also known as scattergrams), available on every college page under the ‘My Analysis’ tab.

These graphs display the accepted and rejected applicants scattered across a 2D canvas according to the variables that you choose. For example, you might look at Unweighted GPA & SAT, or Instate & Average AP Score. To get started with this new tool, see Cornell’s scatterplots.

For any given SAT score, valedictorians appear more likely to get into Cornell than non-valedictorians.

Because there are many, many overlaps, you can set a level of jitter, so each point floats near its true value. For example, if you look at Unweighted GPA and Valedictorian Status, everyone will clump on top of one another. (You either are a valedictorian, or you aren’t, so there are only 2 slots that you might possibly fit into – hence lots of clumping.) If you set a 20% jitter to Valedictorian Status, things will spread out nicely, so you can see what is really going on.

With your feedback and criticism (please post it here or in the forums), we’ll work on improving the tool. Enjoy!

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

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.

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.

Today the site has reached an important milestone: there are now 10,000 registered members. Thanks for your interest in this site and for your contributions to one another.

Some communities become more distant and less useful as their numbers grow. I think our community is quite the opposite; as more people join and contribute, we’ll all gain better insight into the daunting process of college admissions. And I’m working on a few tools right now to help keep the community interconnected, even as the site grows larger.

Until soon.

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.