Hi,
I made a Parchment account a few days ago, and saw that it calculated the chances of me getting into my top colleges.
How accurate are these probabilities?
Thanks
Not very
After going through 2 Parchment accounts for my kids I think it is predictive.
Used it last year. It was way overly optimistic.
We used it last year for my daughter. Her results seemed to match the Parchment predictions. I also have a sense that some of the “yellow” schools were overly optimistic. But she did get waitlisted in that range. Her only outright denials were schools listed as “red.”
I think it is a parlour game. There is no way to be sure people have accurate info or that it is a full picture of all admissions. Use your school’s Naviance and the Common Data Set instead.
D has a Parchment account and I think some schools look accurate but others seem way off. I do try to look at the Common Data Set and her Naviance and both of those seem to closer align to what I see on Cappex.
What’s hard with all of these tools is you just don’t know the individual backstory for the dot on the chart. There is more factored in to the admissions then just GPA and SAT/ACT scores and the scatter-grams really only show you those two data points. You don’t know about essay, EC’s, etc. that might have factored in to why someone with high stats was denied and someone with low stats was accepted.
Good tools to give you an idea but you have to take the information with a little bit of skepticism.
I suspect that the more selective and/or “holistic” the admissions process, the less predictive it is, but any of these things can give you at least a relative measure of green light / yellow light / red light which may help inform how you set up your range of choices. But I’d take any of it with a HUGE grain of salt.
Unlike your school’s Naviance dataset which includes results of ALL applicants, Parchment’s dataset is over-represented by happy applicants.
Naviance has ALL applicants FOR YOUR SCHOOL. Which is useful because of geographic variations and school perception etc., but a different subset of “all.”
Bingo!
Additionally, many kids do not come back and update their profiles with their actual results, particularly rejections.
FWIW - my D applied to many schools, and was accepted everywhere that Parchment said her chances were 80% or better, and denied or wait-listed everywhere else, with only one exception.
Parchment says my D has the following chances:
Rice - 46%
WUSTL - 58%
Harvey Mudd - 79% @-)
yeah, right.
And there ya have it.
Thanks for the advice, everyone! I do have a Naviance account, so I’ll go check on there. Thanks again!
Naviance is very useful, but you should take it, too, with a healthy grain of salt. There’s no subtlety to the results, and if I’d believed it completely, I would have though my kid had zero chance at some places where he got in. But it did provide a helpful cautionary note that kept us from getting too far ahead of ourselves.
@SpikeyMike13 What was the one exception? Acceptance to a school that Parchment estimated at below 80% or a denial above 80%? Thanks!
Knowing full well that Parchment has all the flaws discussed above, I decided to play the parlor game anyway, and see how things turned out.
At the schools where he was denied, Parchment claimed my kid’s chances had ranged from 40 - 78%. (I thought the 78% school was a solid match for him, and it was the ringer in the results – the next one down was a 62%).
At the schools where he was admitted, Parchment claimed my kid’s chances ranged from 64% to 99%. The 64% school was a pleasant surprise at the time, so the ringer in that set. The rest of the admits were estimated at 78% and up.
Although the numbers are unreliable, for the most part I’d say the red/yellow/green flagging was mostly on target except for one “green” school that was in my mind much more of a yellow (Parchment put his chances at 96%, but I’d consider it more in league with schools that estimated an 85% chance), and one yellow that should almost certainly have been a green.
He didn’t apply to any schools in the red zone, got into all the greens, and 2/3 of the yellows, solidly those in the 80% and up set, mixed bag between 64 and 78 and no dice at 62 and under.
Just one report. Your mileage may vary. All due caution due to self reporting and poor follow-up.
Wow! I think the chance threads here do better! 
@porcupine98 , might we ask the number of schools in each category? And also the level of schools in the “62 and under”? (i.e. most selective nationally, unis vs lac, etc)Thanks.
@wvuhopeful - it was Bowdoin, Parchment said 40%.