The title says it all. There is literally no point in doing a chance me for Stanford, especially when someone on CC will lie and say the respective OP has a great chance.
IMO, since the chance threads started by & responded( & generally, the only ones interested in such) to are high school students, not admission officers, none of them are taken very seriously by anyone out of high school.
Let them have their fun.
Why limit the ban to just Stanford? Why not all selective colleges? Why not all colleges as I never see any AOs weigh in on any of them. I agree with emerald. There is absolutely no value to those threads, so why not let the HS kids have their fun? If you’ve read one of those threads, you’ve read them all. Very easy to ignore them.
What might be useful, though, is a pin on the Chances forum that explains that no one can chance anyone and that the forum is just a way to pass time, like any game.
I don’t think any parents take chances threads very seriously. As long as they keep them off the parents threads, I really don’t care of kids chance each other or not.
I don’t think they should be banned but having a long thread and keep bumping up improves no more chances. Once you get an idea that you are not wasting an application, go work on your essays.
@AnnieBeats, I agree with you about the chances threads being a total waste of time (not just for Stanford) but why do they bother you? I love that CC has them segregated into their own forum and as long as new posters don’t put them in the Admissions forum or other inappropriate places on the site, I tend to forget they exist.
Just ignore them.
Really? You remember this is CC, right?
No. Just ignore them if you don’t want to see them. I do.
There’s no point in chances threads for any elite school. Why you are singling out Stanford makes no sense.
Well, it’s not limited to Stanford. But chances for Stanford are the most ridiculous.
They are all silly.
I think parents should be banned from reading them
I think that there is some benefit at times. Especially for a high school student who has no idea about the difficulty of being admitted.
When a student says that they have a 1480 SAT score, a 19 ACT score, no major EC’s and only wants to got to Stanford, MIT or an Ivy League college, that is when the responses can be the most helpful in guiding the student or parent toward more realistic options.
I was about to post that college confidential should host an app for this - but I noticed SuperMatch is already there and tried it for the first time and put in sample numbers/factors for one of my kids and it was about a 75% good match in the suggested colleges (not bad). Now if they could give summaries that were easier to read - a nice table with “safety, good fit, reach, big reach” - might be able to cut down some of the “chance me” traffic (obviously people will still ask about strength of ECs and subjective info on fit) but seems silly to have people look up how objective info for a student maps to the common data set info if an app can do the first pass.
Forbid chance me threads until they have gone through supermatch?
No, they should not be banned.
A student really cannot chance himself/herself. He/She is too close to the situation, and emotions get in the way. Students are not good at judging how their applications will be viewed. The student may think they have a decent chance at Stanford because being president of the ‘Resurrect the Passenger Pigeon’ club shows leadership, when a more objective eye can see that Shaw and his posse won’t care diddly about it.
Parents aren’t good sources of chancing, either. What parent would want to tell their child that they have no hope at Stanford, which has become the dream school of virtually everyone in the world, besides those in flyover country who haven’t heard of elite schools and could care less and go to state flagships? Close friends aren’t going to be objective, either.
You might think guidance counselors are good sources of chancing, since they are professionals, but we have heard many stories here on CC about how useless guidance counselors can be. And even if you are a definite shoo-in, a counselor would never tell you that, on that slim chance that something weird happens, and then the headaches start with parents complaining that the counselor gave the student false hope and devastated their precious snowflake. I have cousins who were guidance counselors and believe me, you don’t want to be hit with a lawsuit. So they won’t be straight with you, either.
The only place to get a good chancing is from the objective and knowledgeable participants on an anonymous message board like here on CC. And the more responses you get, it then becomes a ‘Big Data’ problem, where applying some relatively straightforward Bayesian statistics can compensate for the clueless and the liars, and give you a fairly accurate assessment of your chances with a confidence in the range of p<.05.
@skrlvr The problem isn’t objectivity. It’s the sheer unpredicatability of Stanford admissions. There was a kid on here with a 1700 SAT score who got into Stanford. Most posters would say he shouldn’t have wasted his time applying.
With all chance threads, I’m always tempted to respond with the exact admission rate from the year before. “I give you an 8.6% chance of admission”
I never even bother to look at the Chance Me threads. There’s really very little point to them in my opinion.
If one is seriously interested in a school, they should have the ability to look up the admission statistics for that school, compare them to their own statistics, and gauge their own chances.
Most of the people that I’ve seen doing ‘chance’ threads are high school students who are posting their own ‘chance me’ threads. I don’t think many high school students are qualified to fully understand the dynamics of college admissions decisions.
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Although much of the raw data is on the NCES site (and many colleges publish their common data set info buried on their own websites), I really doubt that most high school students know where to find it and what to look for and how to read it. Many simply rely on anecdotal information or the various magazine college rankings without knowing how to do the first pass that a computer can do an ok job it - matching their objective data to the published data.
The schools that only offer need based aid are the most competitive academically.
When you remove the schools that are so endowed they are need blind, and have left the schools that are need aware, they become even more competitive for students who need over half of COA covered.
D was below median in stats & scores for her college.( which is why she didn’t apply ED)
We would have been happy with her next choice school, but figured WTH?
She was accepted with a very nice full aid package.
They consider other things besides numbers for admission.
Essays, strength of curriculum & recommendations are important as well.