<p>What does it mean when someone says like high match, low reach, high reach, low match, etc</p>
<p>The scale is this:</p>
<p>Safety, Low match, Match, High Match, low reach, mid reach, high reach</p>
<p>It goes from most likely to be accepted to least likely!</p>
<p>If something is a Match, I think one is projected to have about a 50% shot!</p>
<p>–If something is a Match, I think one is projected to have about a 50% shot!–</p>
<p>If that were the case, we could rank students’ chances by ten percent intervals. We cannot. There’s nothing so precise as that. I know you said “about” but that’s a very big about. All kinds of things figure into an admissions decision, and certainly the categories above are vague and inaccurate. That’s why they’re not percentiles or unlikely/possible/likely, although “possible” comes closest to accuracy because at any school it is possible for anyone to be admitted. No one can count on getting in anywhere or being denied anywhere.</p>
<p>By those terms we mean that a college might consider your resumé a match with the students it admits. Or another college might consider your resumé a reach compared to the students it admits. A third might consider your resumé a safety compared to the students it admits.</p>
<p>The first important consideration is that the student should not judge his or her position in the range from safety to reach for any one college but allow people with more familiarity with the system to do so. Students like adults, generally, are not objective evaluators of themselves, and they don’t have enough information to judge themselves or anyone else. (I know of very few people who will tell you that they are of below average intelligence, and yet half the human race is by definition.)</p>
<p>The second important consideration is that students often want to know where they have a chance of getting in long before they want to know if they can afford that school. There’s no point putting together a list of schools you cannot afford to go to. So it’s important to construct a list of schools you can afford. If you haven’t run the net price calculators and received a commitment from your parents about what they will contribute each year, you don’t have a list. </p>