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.

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.