A Guide to Chancing Yourself with Parchment's Scatterplots

Chance Me / Match Me!
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<p>Remove the "%" symbol from the links. CollegeConfidential does not let me post pictures with imgur. I should have used tinypic.</p>

<p>Parchment is a very useful tool to figure out your chances for a certain college. However, for Parchment to be useful, you must know its strengths and weaknesses. Its predictions are awful. Do not use them. Its scatterplots, on the other hand, are extremely useful for figuring out your chances. To effectively use the scatterplots, you must understand the settings. I will demonstrate how to use Parchment's scatterplots by analyzing the admission stats of the Universities of California.</p>

<p><a href="http://i.imgur.%com/Pu5KNRE.png"&gt;http://i.imgur.%com/Pu5KNRE.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Unweighted GPA and SAT score are perhaps the two most important factors in college admissions. Use them as the axes. People often have the same stats. Thus, the percent randomness can make the dots more visible by making it less likely for two dots to be on top of one another. Filters allow you to zoom in on the graph. They can also be used to make your graph up to date. That is the reason why I made the year entering greater than or equal to 2012. I unchecked "Show legend?" because the legend tends to block valuable parts of the graph. The legend states that blue dots are accepted, green dots are attending, and red dots are rejected.</p>

<p>UCB:
<a href="http://i.imgur.%com/Z1pyFCL.png"&gt;http://i.imgur.%com/Z1pyFCL.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Note that the SAT score is the average of the three sections. Just multiply the SAT score by three to find the total score. I used MS Paint to draw yellow lines where I believe separates the safety stats, match stats, and reach stats. I determined the yellow lines by estimating the concentration of red dots versus the concentration of blue and green dots. The yellow lines are almost vertical. This suggests that UCB really cares about GPA, but only cares a little bit about SAT scores.</p>

<p>UCLA:
<a href="http://i.imgur.%com/ubKNZBY.png"&gt;http://i.imgur.%com/ubKNZBY.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>UCSD:
<a href="http://i.imgur.%com/7OnrTbG.png"&gt;http://i.imgur.%com/7OnrTbG.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>UCD:
<a href="http://i.imgur.%com/1s2QCYR.png"&gt;http://i.imgur.%com/1s2QCYR.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>UCI
<a href="http://i.imgur.%com/4wXVv7W.png"&gt;http://i.imgur.%com/4wXVv7W.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Notice how in almost all the scatterplots, my yellow lines are almost vertical? Most people think that someone with a 2200+ SAT score (divided by three is 733.33+) and a 3.6-3.7 unweighted GPA will definitely be accepted by UCD and UCI because his/her SAT score is so high and his/her GPA is not too low. However, if you look at where such a person would lie on the scatterplot, you would see that UCD and UCI is a match, not a safety for that person. Although a 3.6-3.7 GPA is not too low, it is below average.</p>

<p>UCSB
<a href="http://i.imgur.%com/3ab0Dfk.png"&gt;http://i.imgur.%com/3ab0Dfk.png&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>UCSB is an exception among the UCs. Unlike all the other UCs, UCSB can be called a safety if you have a 2200+ SAT score. UCSB values high SAT scores a lot more than the other UCs do.</p>

<p>My admission results agree with Parchment's scaterplots. I have a 2300 SAT score (divided by three is 766.67). My unweighted GPA is only 3.66 (weighted is 4.29 and capped UCGPA is 4.00). Among the UCs that I applied to, UCB, UCLA, and UCSD rejected me (Cal Poly SLO also rejected me, but it is not a UC). I was also waitlisted by UCD and UCI. I was accepted by UCSB because of my high SAT score.</p>

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<p>I’m torn on this one…first, note that much of (all?) of the Parchment data is self-reported. For the colleges my daughter was considering, it consistently showed much higher acceptance rates than the schools report. However, the odds Parchment showed were similar to those shown by Naviance for her high school.</p>

<p>We used the Parchment scatterplots and filters to see how the odds for students in my daughter’s demographic differed from the norm, and whether it made sense for her to apply to ED or EA to any of them. Based on this data, I advised her to pick one of Harvard, Princeton and Yale and apply EA. She picked one, applied EA, and was accepted. She applied to the other two RD and was not accepted, so at least in her case, her experience was in line with the Parchment data, which suggested her odds of RD acceptance to these schools were much smaller.</p>

<p>Keep in mind that all students with the same scores and grades are not created equal, and Parchment cannot take this into account. You can however view the profiles attached to the data points and perhaps glean some information from them.</p>