<p>yeah, the counselor-o-matic gives special preferences to certain schools, you have to ignore that.</p>
<p>The schools like Lehigh that appear with a blue background are sponsor schools--they pay to be at the top. Aside from that, I'd say it's a good tool to use to make a preliminary "long list" of schools to consider, but worthless when it comes to calculating chances (who can do that with any accuracy anyway?). </p>
<p>Personally, I made good use of PR's "Students Say" feature to weed out schools with a social atmosphere I didn't want (preppy, lots of drinking, etc.). Take it all with a grain of salt and you should be OK.</p>
<p>I'm not sure how good the Counselor - O' Matic is at breaking down schools into the categories of reach vs match, but I think it is very good with regard to the % it gives to how suited the individual colleges are to your parameters. I was very (pleasantly) surprised to see that my top two choices came out 1,2 after inputting all the information. I wish I had such a resource around when I was applying to schools.</p>