<p>I'm in uncharted territory...but here goes! :)</p>
<p>My parents are considering paying for services which could "predict" or "estimate" my chances at the colleges I am applying to. It will help them with their decisions, and help relieve my anxiety!</p>
<p>I have some questions:</p>
<p>1) Parents, what are your thoughts on this? Do they work, have you used them before, and are they pretty accurate? I'm thinking of referring my parents to Go 4 Ivy (the website looks legitimate to me).
2) Didn't CC have a stats evaluation service before? Is that still around? I would really prefer to use CollegeConfidential.</p>
<p>Don't waste your time and money paying for your stats to be evaluated. A few weeks on CC can teach you the same thing.</p>
<p>Do not start a chance me thread, people get tired of those.</p>
<p>Stats are really only a thresh hold, once you are in the room you application depends on everything else besides the stats except in a few numbers oriented, mainly public programs.</p>
<p>For instance, it seems like on the old SAT, you really needed to get at least 1400 to be considered for an Ivy type school, yes, 1500 is better and may get you money, but 1400 was the generally accepted barrier.</p>
<p>The same with GPA, for example, 3.5 is about the minimum for med school, 3.0 may keep your merit scholarship, but you'd better be amazing in many other areas to over come that GPA.</p>
<p>So, the stats get you into the review, after that it is up to you to present yourself as an interesting person. If only 10% of people get into Ivys and they brag about turning down perfect SAT scorers, obviously it is way more than the numbers that create an admissions offer</p>
<p>I wouldn't waste the money on a stats eval. I don't know what types of schools you are aiming for, but a rule of thumb would be that for any school that is not, say, in the top 25, you can just go to Princeton Review or the college's own website and check the stats of the type of student they admit. If you fall into their ranges, then provided you don't have any red flags on your app (like having been suspended), you should expect to be admitted. The closer you are to the top of their range in SAT scores and GPA, the better your odds are. Odds improve even more if you have special talent (good musician, athlete, etc.) or if you are a legacy, URM or come from a unusual geographical region. Due to the competitive admissions at the very top schools, you can use the college's admission stats as the bare minimum required to be considered for admission. At those schools, there are no guarantees, unless you are that truly unusual and spectacular candidate, but if you are, you probably already know that.</p>
<p>Do not waste your money on a stats review. As posted above, stats are simply a threshold to cross in order to get your application a serious read at highly competitive schools. However, there are many exceptions. Last year two CC posters were admitted to Brown Univ. with a 24 ACT & a 25 ACT. One was a first generation Mexican/American. A stats review would have told them not to bother applying to Brown or to any highly selective school. Other schools reject many 1500+/1600 SAT I scorers because they are not a match for the school to which they applied.
Many CC posters are students applying to college and tend to focus too much on stats. Your essays, teacher recs, ECs, special talents & racial/ethnicity can also be major admissions considerations as can geography.</p>
<p>in response to your other question, CC sort of split off its paid functions a while ago onto a sister site called "college karma." It looks like in doing so however, they dramatically raised their prices. You can now expect to pay $150. Stats</a> Eval from College Karma IMO, it wasn't even worth the money when it was $89, but since you asked, I figure someone should answer.</p>
<p>I found College Confidential's (now College Karma) Stats Evaluation to be useful with my first child. By the time kid #2 was up to bat, I had gained enough knowledge to evaluate his chances.</p>
<p>The other problem with stats review is that local context is also important. If you go to Andover or Exeter your ranking will probably not have to be as high as if you are at your local public high school. If your school doesn't have something like Naviance available you will have to ask your guidance counselor what sort of stats students who got into the colleges you like have had in the past. For example, I found out that 100% of kids with my son's stats had gotten into RPI, so that looked like a safety, 16% had gotten into Stanford (but they'd had much lower stats than the ones that hadn't gotten in, so it was obvious I needed to ask questions about what they'd brought to the table), on the other hand 50% had gotten into Harvard so that looked like a better bet than I had expected. If I'd asked a stats evaluation service, they would surely have given his chances for Harvard and Stanford as about the same and surely way, way less than 50%.</p>
<p>IvyR - I agree with the previous posters -- at this level good stats simply means your application won't get laughed out of the admissions office. It's the OTHER stuff that matters. As MathMom said, having "stats" that put you at the 95th percentile of accepted students DOESN'T mean you'll be accepted at an elite school. Good luck, reach high, but be sure you have a couple of true safeties that you really love.</p>
<p>If your school has Naviance, that's three or four times better than a stats evaluation service, with approximately the same inputs. If you can find two or three comparable schools and look at their Naviance sites, that's just as good or better, too. And if what you are thinking about is Harvard, Yale, etc., forget about it, because "stats" aren't sufficient data to give you a meaningful assessment of your chances. (With mathmom's example, I question whether there was really a sufficient sample to tell her that someone with her child's stats had a 50% chance of getting into Harvard from his school. And even if I am wrong the "answer" was essentially a coin flip.)</p>
<p>I think there was a link on CC last year about college "consultants" who charge everyone a fee to evaluate their chances and give a money back guarantee that you WILL get in to one of the schools on your reach list. The consultant does no work, approves of the reach list, refunds the money to those who don't make their reaches, and pockets the money from anyone who does. I guess I'm a cynic, but I don't think a professional stats evaluator can tell you much that you can't figure out from CC, Fiske, or the schools' websites.</p>
<p>Naviance is a subscription service for high schools. Ask your guidance counselor about it. Your counselor chart all accpetance, rejections, and waitlists for each student that graduates from your high school. Students remain anonymous, but you'd know, for example, that a student with a 3.4 and a 23 got into Ohio State, 3.2 student with 25 was rejected, etc. It's a better indicator because it's comparing kids from YOUR high school. If you don't have it, just talking with your guidance counselor if a better option and it's free.</p>
<p>If you don't have access to Naviance, use the Stats Profiles feature here at CC, the College Board tool and try out mychances.net, too. Save your parents some money.</p>
<p>We used the "Stats Evaluation" when DS was looking for colleges, it was $89 at the time. I thought it was worth it; in addition to evaluating his chances at the colleges he was thinking of applying to, they recommended a few other colleges he might like that seemed fit his stats and the type of schools he was interested in. They also looked over his first draft of his essay and made a few general comments, one of which pointed out a big negative that neither my son nor I had noticed! </p>
<p>I didn't realize that the service had moved to another website and the fee had gone up so much. Still, $150 is short money compared to what a private college counselor will charge you.</p>
<p>I think the paid stats evaluators attract two kinds of families: the ones with ambitious parents and slacker child, who are hoping against hope that an outsider can reassure them (usually with no basis) that their kid is going to outfox the system. Can it happen? Yes. Will it be you? Probably not. The second type of family is one where the kid is a very nice and kind BWRK with great grades and scores; well rounded, well liked, does community service and has a mean tennis serve. Will this kid get into Yale? Dunno.... if s/he is from Wyoming or has a compelling personal story then maybe. If the kid is from Winnetka or Atherton than probably not.</p>
<p>I've just saved you $100. My reward is in heaven as Sarah Palin likes to say....</p>
<p>JHS, I agree that the 50% chance of getting into Harvard is probably exaggerated. Naviance doesn't tell you that those students with the top stats in our school are also Science Olympiad finalists, Davidson Scholars or have other equivalent accomplishments. It was still quite surprising to me. Usually two to four students get in each year. But last year no one got in. (But that class also had no NMFs so their stats may have been correspondingly lower - I don't have access to the Naviance graphs anymore.)</p>
<p>you could try out this site: CollegeData:</a> College Search, Financial Aid, College Application, College Scholarship, Student Loan, FAFSA Info, Common Application You put in your stats , then under the college chances section put in the school you are interested in. then you can follow up with admission tracker for that school and see who got admitted and their stats and who didnt etc. (its all self reported so have to take that into consideration)<br>
you can also adjust your stats ie what are your chances if you were to raise your scores or gpa etc.</p>
<p>We used the stats eval offered on this site way back when. It was valuable and informative and to us - a bargain. Coming from the hinterlands , with no sources of local data (Naviance or the like), it was nice to have Dave Berry do the look-over. I have no experience with the way it is done now, or even if/how it has changed.</p>