It’s still early. I’d say it’s not caught on the way I’d hoped but it has produced some moderately encourage results in terms of the data. The main thing to understand is that activity drops by about half on April 1. Since we started the contest on April 3, the number of people favoriting schools not in the contest have dropped by 46% since the previous period. (To be clear, the two periods are March 18, 2023 to April 2 and April 3 to April 18.)
Meanwhile the schools in the contest have dropped 37%. Obviously I’d hoped the drop would be a lot smaller or even an increase. I also can’t prove the difference has been the contest. These are some of the most active school on the forums, after all. But it does suggest some people are motivated to update their admission status based on this contest. We’ll learn more as the field narrows since it will change which schools are being featured. That will let me isolate what, if any, effect the showdown is having.