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?

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.

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.