I am curious as to how many people on the board use princetonreview.com’s counselor o- matic and how accurate it was in predicting your chances of acceptance.
<p>It's not accurate at all. It's sometimes extremely over-optimistic, and sometimes totally pessimistic. It's good for giving you some ideas for schools you might not have considered, but not good for assessing chances.</p>
<p>It's good only to give you an idea of which schools might interest you. The chances they give are pretty worthless -- they're based entirely on the statistics the schools release to them, which often aren't a very reliable indication of anything. This is especially true of schools with an admittance rate under 25%.</p>
<p>I think of it as a starting point to identify some schools that you might not have considered. It's accuracy is questionable at best.</p>
<p>Yeah, when it said I had no reach schools, I seriously raised my eyebrows. But its rankings are interesting, and getting ideas of new schools is useful.</p>
<p>some of the stuff is pretty useful in terms of just spitting out instant stats for each college but the actual personal ranking part is pretty dubious.They way they figure out your 'weak fits' 'good fits' and stuff is not the most reliable thing in the word. I would take everything with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>My son was told that Harvard was a match, which is not true for anyone.
He's 1400, 3.85</p>
<p>I used the Counselor-O-M (before it changed slightly) and it seemed quite fun. It is great for narrowing down schools, eliminating according to major, region, size... and I liked the way they gave the %age fit for you, so Harvard might be your reach school, as well as MIT, but you may have a 90% fit (in terms of criteria you are looking for) with MIT, but only 50% fit for Harvard. Just another way of showing that U.S. news rankings aren't everything, especially when it comes to tailoring/personalizing college lists to suit your specific needs.
Interestingly, I, and a few other people who've used COM, had <em>no reach schools</em> - even Harvard was considered a "Good Fit"... so it was definitely fun to see that!</p>