MyChances.net

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.

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.

Are there things on this site that just don’t work the way you think they should? Are we missing something? Have we designed something in a stupid way, or left something out that you need?

Reply to this thread and let us know. Bluntness, bitter sarcasm, and general outrage are welcome in your replies.

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!

Member ‘ckmets13′ asked for us to start including IB courses on the site, so we’ve done that. You can enter up to 10 IB courses to display in your profile.

So over the past two days I’ve rolled out two new features: private messaging and the Selectivity Index.

Private messaging does what you’d expect: it allows you to communicate with other users directly via the site. This way, when you’re browsing through profiles and you want to ask someone a question or give some words of encouragement, you can do so easily.

The Selectivity Index is a way to gauge, at a glance, how your scores compare to the scores of accepted students at a given school. If you have a higher selectivity index, you are above the 50th percentile for students applying to a given school. By no means will this tell you if you will get in, but it is another tool to help you see how you stack up numerically. Always keep in mind that numbers are not everything - especially at this point in history.

We’ve had scatterplots for some time now. Scatterplots, I think, are good for showing how scores cluster. In general, you’ll expect to see acceptances at the top right (highest GPA and highest SAT), with rejections beneath that and to the left. If you break down law school statistics, they tend to go by the numbers. However, if you look at some of the top schools for undergrad, it becomes clear that it’s not just a numbers game.

For example, you might see the UC Berkeley scatterplot and think, ‘How did that guy with the 4.0 2400 get rejected?’ Well, instead of searching the list of UC Berkeley applicants, you can just click on the dot to read his story, because each dot on the scatterplots now links to the user’s profile.