Chance for UVA/UNC/Emory/Davidson

Chance Me / Match Me!
1

-White, male, HS rising senior

-Attending to a competitive public high school in NC, GPA UW 4.0, W 5.18, Top 10 in my class of around 400-500 people

-Courses next year: IB Spanish SL, AP Physics B, AP Calc BC, AP Psych, AP Gov, AP English 12

-Taken AP World (5), AP Stats (4), AP Human Geography (5), AP Biology, AP Art History, AP US History, AP English 11

-SAT 2180 (CR: 740, M: 7400, W: 700, E:11), ACT 33

-ECs:
-Mu Alpha Theta (treasurer),
-Spanish Club,
-Mock Trial,
-Drama Club (Head costumer),
-National Honor Society,
-Environmental Club,
-Young Life,
-Key Club

-Over 250 service hours through math tutoring and GYC, a volunteer organization affiliated with my town’s Parks and Rec department, in which I am the secretary for one of its most important events

My main considerations as to colleges right now are UVA, UNC Chapel Hill, Davidson,and Emory. Chances by all are both welcome and appreciated!

2

Good choices, but UVA you are OOS.

3

Davidson College 50%
Emory University 55%
University of Virginia-Main Campus 56%
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 57%

UVA, probably a bit lower because I’m not compensating for you coming from out of state.

That’s a good list of match schools for you, in my opinion. I would consider Tufts, Georgetown or Johns Hopkins as possible reaches, maybe Duke as a high reach / long shot.

University of Maryland-College Park would be a good safety.

4

Thanks for your input, @NickFlynn! If I may ask, how did you calculate such a specific probability?

5

Well, the exact details are proprietary (grin) but the basic idea is as follows:

I estimate your percentile rank within last years admitted freshman class based on:

  1. Your test scores versus the 25/75 data for the school
  2. Your unweighted GPA (adjusted roughly for the rigor of your course load) versus data for that school (either real or estimated if unavailable)
  3. Adjust for “hook” or “tag” type factors (legacy / URM / 1st gen / etc)

and then use that combined with the school’s admit rate to compute a chance of admission based on a model that I developed.

There are some other factors considered, but that’s the basics.

Stuff that is not considered: ECs and of course the strength of your application!

Personally, I think it is more accurate than the similar estimators I’ve looked at on the web…maybe not dead accurate, but definitely useful for the purpose intended, which is to properly classify schools relative to each other for identifying reach / match / safety schools.

(Normally, I tend to just round them off to the nearest 5% increment, but you had three schools all right on top of each other, so I left the numbers as they were. I know they aren’t that accurate!)