As @thumper1 mentioned, you can mute the threads. In fact, you can preemptively mute all the threads in the tag:
Thanks for that suggestion!
Muting a thread wouldn’t help - but being able to mute all threads with a given tag should do the trick. I’m just too old & grumpy to have to scroll past gimmicky stuff taking over every screen, in addition to it already being advertised in yellow “alert” bars etc.
Based on the lack of participation, I don’t think there’s much interest in this. And it’s creating a lot of ‘thread pollution’. Maybe using a survey tool would be more direct/convenient?
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The students didn’t appear to be interested in this. Were the Student Ambassadors tasked with drumming up interest? I asked how successful that initiative has been, and never got a reply (which I guess is a reply).
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Based on the 79 clicks on the 2 links I posted above about the schools students chose when looked at head to head, seems that’s a more helpful way to explore this issue. There was a study published many years ago with tables comparing choices students made ( eg how many chose Penn over Columbia, etc). But I can’t find it at the moment. If I do I’ll link it.
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ETA- oops, now I realize Jym626’ earlier post was to a NYT article describing the Parchment data I linked to below!
It could be that the Parchment link has updated data, but who knows.
If I’m understanding you correctly, this link from Parchment might be of interest. It shows the proportion of students admitted to a particular pair of schools who chose one or the other. (You can add your own school choices in place of those given in this example.)
They describe the methodology a bit, but it’s not clear to me exactly where the data come from, or what size dataset is used. Still, I thought it was fun to play around with.
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wasn’t sure CC would let us post a link to parchment 
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.
The matchups just don’t seem to make sense to me so am still confused about this whole thing. But, good luck.
@CC_Jon, how do you measure “most active schools”? Are these 32 the ones with the most active forums? The most mentioned schools? Or something else.
Just curious. Thanks.
This one. It’s the forums with the most posts over the last year. It’s a way of pairing schools semi-randomly.
I looked at a few other ways to seed schools, including enrollment. Turns out the school with the largest enrollment doesn’t have any posts on CC! (As an aside, my wife recently got her Masters in Nurse Education there.) It didn’t seem like that school would get many people marking their status there.
Just a note that I’ve looked at this page and contest and am still utterly confused about how it’s supposed to work. I still don’t understand how one would “favorite” a school somehow. Honestly just am bewildered about the whole thing. I can answer survey questions or cast votes in a poll, but this seems different and makes me feel dumb. Perhaps that’s why there is little engagement.
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I was referring to the Student Ambassador program as “that initiative,” not the School Favorites Showdown. I asked about the Student Ambasassdor program’s success, and never got a response to that question.