<p>College Confidential has the reputation for sucking quite hard. Why is this?</p>
<p>Each year, eager prefrosh who are anxious to prove just how smart they are, post a bajillion stats about themselves and then ask others to rate their chances. Issues with this?</p>
<p>a) Everybody applying to MIT has good stats. Posting stats to College Confidential only makes you seem arrogant and makes College Confidential more of a cesspool.</p>
<p>b) How is knowing what other students think going to help you at all? It's all about the admissions officers, and I know for a fact that several avoid CC like the plague.</p>
<p>c) It makes people angry. Seriously, posting stats just fills up the entire thread with garbage and you have to scroll down forever to find anything.</p>
<p>Such important matters taken under consideration, I would propose a Stat Free Year of MIT College Confidential. This means for the class of 2013, NOBODY POST STATS!!! Just talk about how exciting MIT is, concerns you may have, and ask questions, but don't post a list of everything you've done since you were born.</p>
<p>If you really want info or stats questions, PM people. If you aren't willing to PM individuals with stats then you shouldn't be willing to spam the entire internet.</p>
<p>ambitious goal... unrealistically ambitious, that is. :P
having myself posted a few chances thread, i completely resonate with the pre-application anxiety. one of CC's purpose is to alleviate (though often the opposite is achieved) the applicants' stress by providing a place for expressions. and if that means posting chance threads and getting approval from fellow CCers, so be it.
also, new CC users arent familiar with the forums enough to know who they should PM, and chance threads and the follow-ups are a perfect opportunity for them to know whom to turn to for questions (ducktape, molliebatmit, et al).
that said, i recommend users who intend to post a chance thread to read some similar posts from last year and learn some basic CC etiquette/conventions before posting something that may sound arrogant.
good luck EA '13!</p>
<p>^Actually, I have never replied to a chances thread that doesn't ask specific factual questions that I am capable of answering. :) So people who post chances threads won't know about me unless they stick around and read factual-question-asking posts.</p>
<p>I think stats sometimes is okay, but chance threads gets really annoying.
If there is 1 or 2 threads per year that is fill with stats from EA decision and regular decision, it is okay. It helped me a lot when i applied. I got a sense of my chances ( and for better or for worse, it at least calmed me down a bit) and it is actually informative-ish (at least they make a good database) when you can actually see a bigger picture of what kind of people have been accepted.
So no more chance threads would be nice, they tends to only clutter up the forum. If you want to see your chance be a smart MIT hopeful and actually read through the decision threads to get a sense of your chance, since only the real decision counts.</p>
<p>I think it might be much more helpful to applicants to look at the decision threads instead of posting their stats. After all, the decision threads contain actual choices made by admissions officers and the stats of students who already applied.</p>
<p>i somewhat disagree. I am an international student, and I didnt have any idea as to what my competition was, and whether i truly had a chance at some of the top schools. In fact, before being admitted, i didnt actually know anyone else who made MIT or a school of that calibre.
I think Chance threads are perfectly fine as long as they are ONLY in the chance section, and the OPs are willing to hear honest responses.</p>
<p>I agree. For the most part, chance threads are rarely useful. As a potential '13, I won't be posting any chance threads. I don't think anyone but the adcoms are in the position to evaluate them either.</p>
<p>Rather than asking the opinions of others, I think it is more useful to really do some research on the schools you're interested in and evaluate yourself. Threads on CC that deal with specific questions or topics tend to shed more light than statistics-based threads.</p>
<p>Good initiative, but there will still be tons of chance threads and people spamming their statistics all over the place...</p>
<p>@Sidfromaus: that is why you look at decision threads, because what people on CC think don't matter at ALL in terms of whether you'll get in or not( unless they are in the selection team), no matter how long they've been around.
That is what Decision threads are for. Real decisions made by the people who count for real people.</p>
<p>If you're unsure about whether or not you even qualify for MIT, I have two bits of advice:</p>
<p>1) Go ahead and read the "accepted" threads, they can give you a ROUGH idea. Everybody is different and this is a REALLY limited sample. Replicating what you see will NOT get you in.</p>
<p>2) Really think about MIT. MIT is a place that is what it is because the students belong there. The personalities, ideals, and culture is one that just wouldn't thrive without the people here. If you are using statistics to figure out if you belong at MIT then you're doing it wrong. Look online, read stories, and read the admissions blogs to figure out if you should apply to MIT. If you feel like you belong there and think you could do the work then your scores will only help you towards that end.</p>
<p>Chance threads are useless pieces of garbage that turn college confidential into a writhing pile of internet vomit that needs to be mopped up, bleached, and never thought about again. Change that.</p>
<p>IMO, the chance me thing is ok if it's in the appropriate forum or in a private message. That doesn't mean those posted elsewhere do too much harm- give the kiddos a break.</p>
<p>Look i really understand all of you. I mean, you guys must be sick of people just asking you to chance them etc. Totally understandable! I just think people are smart enough to know that a lot of predictions on chance threads arent overly accurate, and if they do so anyway, its their choice!!</p>
<p>I'm going to laugh as an onslaught of MIT'13 prospects crush your idealistic dreams in a giant flood of chances threads. </p>
<p>Besides when did you suddenly get the idea that people on the internet are here to act intelligent? Personally I find the internet is a great opportunity for me to go around and troll and act stupid anonymously. YEAHHH TROLLING!!!</p>
<p>The thing is that reality doesn't really "hit" right away for everyone on CC. There are several stages of CC-er development. First, you have your pre-CC notion. You're best in your class, have great extracurriculars, are on top of the world, yadda yadda. Then comes the OMG there are so many smart people freakout period. And finally the Oh. I CAN get into a college that I'm a fit and match at. </p>
<p>I think that as annoying as chance threads might be, they speed up the development of a CC-er to the final "realistic" stage. That being said, I think that they should be kept to the chances forum and to PMs.</p>