How to post a Chance Me or Match Me (reverse chance me) thread -- START HERE

Chance Me / Match Me!
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There are 2 kinds of posts many students find helpful:

Chance Me: Get feedback on your chances of being accepted to specific schools.
Match Me: Get suggestions for schools that match your profile and interests.

First of all, create a CC account so you can post. Secondly, in order to maximize your chance of someone taking a look at your stats and giving feedback, you’ll need to do a few things:

Title It Well

Include a few details about you in the title:

Transfer student from Boston aiming for UCs and ASU

Tag it

  • If you want chances on specific schools, use the chance-me tag
  • If you want others to suggest schools to you, use the match-me tag

Include details

When you click “+ New Thread”, your post will include a template that you can follow to include the most relevant information. That template includes:

  • Demographics (location, residency, HS type, legacy, US or Int’l, gender, etc)
  • Intended Major(s)
  • UW GPA, Rank, and Test Scores (also weighted GPA for systems like UC/CSU)
  • Coursework (college coursework for transfer applicants)
  • Awards
  • Extracurriculars (incl. summer activities, competitions, volunteering, and work experience)
  • Essays/LORs/Other
  • Cost Constraints / Budget
  • Schools including Safety, Match, Reach (include ED/EA when applicable)

Do not ignore this template! You’ll get the best feedback if you include all of these details.

Don’t Include Unnecessary Personal Details

  • No names, school names, clubs, detailed locations, or anything that could be used to identify you and is not critical to the areas listed above.

Most Importantly, Don’t Take Any of this Personally

You’ll get some great feedback (and probably some feedback you may not like). In either case, take it with a grain of salt. Match me will be especially helpful, because the responder probably has experience with the school. YMMV on Chance Me results.

A Note on Timing

Your Chance Me post has 90 days to gather feedback before it is automatically closed. Until then, posts will be automatically bumped so they get more visibility. You can request your post be open for more time if necessary.

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Whether you love to dish out doses of reality, or love to match students with the dream school they would never pick themselves, you can do it here! To review the different kind of threads, use these links:

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/tag/chance-me

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/tag/match-me

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If people are looking for match suggestions, budget is an important factor.

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Agree that budget should be a line item. And if you are going to autoclose threads, you should do they same on Prep School Chances. @CC_Mike

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Added! Thanks for the suggestion!

The auto close is a bit of an experiment. Let’s see if it works for us and then we can do it other places. The idea is to encourage discussion towards threads that haven’t been answered but I’m not entirely sure auto closing would do that. We’ll see!

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For most students, the most important factor in college choice is really the cost constraints. This is important for both chance-me as well as match-me (in many cases, chance-me is about chances for the large-enough merit scholarship for affordability, not admission).

The most important aspects of “demographics” are really the following:

  • Domestic (US citizen or permanent resident for US schools), international student (there may be other special statuses like DACA/Dreamer).
  • State (or other location) of residency.

Putting gender and race/ethnicity first creates the implication that these are highly important for college admissions, even though there are colleges where they are not considered at all. Also, overemphasizing their importance can be another small push toward the ugly racial resentment politics that has been increasing in the US.

I would recommend changing the template as follows:

  • Cost constraints / budget.
  • US domestic (US citizen or permanent resident) or international student (or special status like DACA/dreamer), and state or location of residency
  • Intended major(s)
  • GPA and class rank. Please include unweighted GPA. If you include weighted GPA, describe the weighting system (weighted GPAs are mainly useful with college-standardized weighting systems, such as UC and CSU, rather than high school weighting systems that are unique to each high school). Transfer applicants should list college and high school GPAs separately.
  • Course work and type of current high school (college for transfer applicants).
  • ACT and SAT scores.
  • Awards.
  • Extracurriculars (including summer activities, competitions, volunteering, and work experience).
  • Essays, recommendations, other.
  • Special factors like athletic recruiting.
  • Demographic factors of possible interest (legacy, gender, race/ethnicity).
  • Colleges to apply to, with your preliminary assessment (indicate whether you plan to apply ED or EA if available):
    • Safety (where you expect certain admission and affordability, or you have already been admitted with affordability by EA or early rolling)
    • Likely (where it would be surprising, but possible, not to get admitted or not to be able to afford)
    • Match
    • Reach
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I weaved in most of it - a few notes:

  • I would like to leave Demographics at the top since students are so used to introducing themselves this way. It also aligns with Reddit’s ChanceMe so they can write once and post twice. That said, I de-emphasized the gender/race etc in favor of location/residency/HS type, etc.
  • Cost/Budget I would like to keep grouped with School list.
  • De-emphasized SAT/ACT test scores by grouping with with rank and GPA
  • Are there any articles about specific weighting systems I can link to?
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I’ve always wondered how one can reverse chance someone else if they’re asking to be chanced themselves. :sweat_smile:

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delete

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You may want to remove URM from “Other special factors”, since that is covered by race/ethnicity in the line above (and different colleges have different definitions of URM).

The most common standardized college weighted HS GPA calculation mentioned here appears to be the one used by University of California schools, described at GPA requirement | UC Admissions with a third party handy calculator at GPA Calculator for the University of California – RogerHub . Students applying to University of California schools should use it and report all three variants of recalculated HS GPA. Obviously, this is not relevant to those not applying to UCs (or CSUs that use a similar recalculation).

But high school calculated weighted HS GPAs tend to be misleading because no one outside of the high school knows what they mean. My usual assumption is to subtract a full grade point when someone reports only a weighted HS GPA.

Also, you may want to add Likely to Safety, Match, and Reach categories.

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In the template, suggest the following changes:

Demographics

  • …
  • Other special factors (first generation to college, legacy, athlete, etc.):

Coursework
(AP/IB/Dual Enrollment classes, AP/IB scores for high school, college for transfers; also include level of math and foreign language reached and any unusual academic electives; for transfers, describe your college courses and preparation for your intended major(s))

There is an extra ) here:

Extracurriculars
(Include leadership, summer activities, competitions, volunteering, and work experience))

Clearer definition of Likely:

Schools
(List of colleges, designate if applying ED/EA/RD)

  • Safety (certain admission and affordability)
  • Likely (surprising, but possiblewould be possible, but very unlikely or surprising, to be rejected)
  • Match
  • Reach
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I think your template has been working well this year - big improvement over last year. One additional recurring pattern that you might be able to help with is the tendency for students to say “my school doesn’t calculate unweighted” and “my school doesn’t rank.” Could you add to the template to calculate their UW themselves and to estimate what decile they are in using their school report if they don’t get a rank?

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Unweighted GPA = (4A + 3B + 2C + 1D + 0F) / (A + B + C + D + F), where A, B, C, D, F are the number of each kind of grade in semesters (or whatever grading term is used at the high school) of academic courses (generally, English, math, history and social studies, science, foreign language, arts – generally not health, PE, home economics, or shop type of courses).

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If i post a match me that is not using this format will it be taken down?

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No. But you’ll likely get better quality responses with as much detail as possible

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A post was split to a new thread: What are my chances and matches?

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As per the discussion on this thread, would it be possible to change the names of the school categories (Safety/Likely/Match/Reach) to these?

• Extremely Likely (90+% chance of acceptance and affordability)
• Likely (60-90% chance of acceptance)
• Possible (25-55% chance of acceptance)
• Unlikely (less than 25% chance of acceptance)

I realize that not all CC-ers posted on the thread, but that classification system did seem to have support from a number of users.

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If you use that schema, you may also want to add:

  • Assured: published automatic admission for what the student has (including to major if applicable) and assured to be comfortably affordable; or already has been admitted (including to major if applicable) with a comfortably affordable net price in an early admission schedule.
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For you, @ucbalumnus, and any others who are interested in the discussion related to whether the categories for this sticky should be changed, the discussion is now in this thread, as I was told by a mod that this was where it should be. If any changes are made, adding a guaranteed or assured category would be a likely inclusion.

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Just wanted to clarify, when you post GPA on these threads, only use full letter grades to calculate GPA, do not use +/-?

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