If you have used collegedata.com and gone through the college admission process with your child(ren), how close are the chance calculator results to the actually results? I know this is only a guiding tool, but I am curious.
My DS is a rising senior with a wGPA of 4.2 and 1300 SAT. All of the schools below fall into the “maybe” box, although some seems like “low” maybes while others “high” maybes. This is the sorted ranking order (low chance to high chance):
U Rochester
Pitts
UMD
Northeastern
UGA
Umass
Binghamton
NC State
OSU
Purdue
BU
Penn State Univ Park
Syracuse
UVM
Rutgers
Uconn
VT
In my mind Rochester, Pitts, UMD and NE are all reaches for DS. If he can score higher on his SAT (he plans to retake it in Aug), some of the aforementioned ones might become low maybes. But what do I know - he is the first child to go through this process and I am still learning as a parent - thanks to this board.
My DD’16’s chances from Cappex where spot on, Niche, Parchment and Collegedata were also not too bad. I don’t know that we really used any of them as a real indicator, more of a “hhhmmm that is interesting”, sort of prediction tool, entertaining.
I will say they were all more accurate than our school district’s Naviance predictions. Likely due to the school district not diligently inputting info and the types of schools she was applying too.
We used college data and niche extensively. They are good for approximations and that’s it. My D applied to U Roch and others. You really have to take acceptance rate in mind. No computer can account for the human component, and the acceptance rates make things less certain. Niche would plot her pretty accurately in a scattergram, but so did college data. Her maybes were not certain. Her good bets worked out. Don’t rely on it. It’s a guideline and that’s all.
data from collegedata.com are basically common data set. They just put it in website. I’d recommend checking the school’s common data set as it is updated regularly whereas collegedata.com may not have been updated at times.
