I have just taken a look at this, and am somewhat surprised in the accuracy of its data: costs, acceptance rates and a few other fields seem to be 95% accurate which I did not expect. It also has a few add ons that would be useful.
Has anyone looked at it, and can they speak to the “chancing” functionality? I am particularly interested in the difference it makes between “all applicants” and “applicants of your background” which I have never seen elsewhere.
I am not promoting the website, just asking if anyone else has looked at it.
You might be 100% correct, and maybe I am fooled (or impressed) that they have amassed a reasonable amount of information accurately. I guess its a stretch to say that good data will result in good predictions. And if so, if nothing, it looks like a reasonably good source of information if not predictions.
The chancing calculator doesn’t take into account rigor, letters of rec, essays, or demonstrated interest…so it’s missing many important factors.
It also can’t place GPA in context because it doesn’t know where the student falls relative to their HS peers, nor does it know how various colleges recalculate GPA (or their average admitted GPAs).
No doubt these are significant factors that is does not (cannot) accurately calculate. All very good points- it is fairly foolhearted to rely on any admission forecast.
However, in comparing schools versus each other, holding these other factors aside, I wonder if it is of any value ranking one’s admissions odds at schools.
Maybe better said, if I want to know if I have a better chance to get into school A versus school B, is it useful?
I agree that college sites will be most accurate. I have been painstakingly gathering much data, dropping it into a spreadsheet I have been keeping. It is laborious and time consuming. But when I compare them, it seems to be pretty accurate, not like some of the junk sites out there. I have not yet seen an egregious errors.
I am far along in data gathering and unlikely to abandon my approach, but to the degree someone is just getting started, it might be a good tool.
I don’t have personal experience at rating the accuracy since decisions haven’t come back yet, however, my sense is that the more selective the school the less accurate the chancing mechanism. For schools that admit a majority of applicants and where decisions are heavily dependent on gpa/scores, they are probably reasonably accurate. Otherwise, not so much.
Best case they have the 2020 CDS data in there, so that’s for class of 2024, not class of 2025. For class of 2025 data you have to go to the school websites. Check student newspaper sites too.
Yes, it would be useful to you because you believe in the website’s accuracy.
If that website’s admission predictor gives you enhanced confidence and enthusiasm for a particular school or schools, then that is a positive. But, what if that website predicts that you will not be admitted to your top choice or to your top three choices ? The reality is that colleges and universities have not subcontracted their admissions functions to this website.
All college websites have strengths and weaknesses, but none are absolute authorities.
We used the Parchment calculator for both of our kids. We did not use the output for purposes of predicting outcomes, but it did help us sort between high reach, reach, match and safety in terms of choosing which schools to apply to. It was an easy way to do a first sort with a comparative table.
I see the chance probabilities as relative to each other. They aligned well with what my son’s counselor said and general perceptions of competitiveness. For example, it gave my kid MIT as the lowest percentage and the safeties as the highest. FWIW, it does gather data beyond just GPA and test scores and it spit out numbers which were more reliable than our school Naviance (which listed MIT and Stanford as a match, LOL!)
Perhaps the member schools do provide proprietary GPA data for example, but they still can’t take into account the other factors I mentioned above, which is not all inclusive either.
This. To use the example of a couple of schools on my list, CollegeVine says that Georgetown’s acceptance rate is 15% and NYU’s acceptance rate is 20%. I assume it uses these data points in its official chances. However, their acceptance rates last year were around 12% and 13%, respectively (based off on official data from the schools). It doesn’t seem that these calculators have been updated to account for the spikes in applicants that occurred last year and the resulting drops in acceptance rate. Aside from all the other issues that have been pointed out in this thread, the current lack of adjustment to changing acceptance rates and applicant pools (which will still be seen this year), means that their chances are going to be fairly inaccurate.
Although not perfect in the absolute sense, they might give some rough relative probability (ie better chances at this one than that one)
Naviance is worthless and the data is incredibly inaccurate. I don’t know why schools even pay for it. Yes- maybe it tracks outcomes of their own students which is somewhat helpful (an very incomplete at that if you scratch the surface) but the school specific data is absolute junk.
My kids’ school district uses Parchment for transcripts, but I didn’t know it had other features. Is this something a school has to opt into? Just curious, since D21 was my last kid.
Naviance (and Scoir and Maia Learning) are only as good as the data each HS inputs, and many of the GCs don’t enter full admission results, round of admission applied in, resolve waitlists, allow users to look at the data by year rather than 3 or 6 year data, etc.
Of course, none of the softwares show major and/or specific school applied to either, or account for the many other factors such as LoRs, essays, hooks, demonstrated interest, etc.
