Personally, what I have found helpful in Chance Me threads is not the opinions, but the reasons for the opinions.
The chance me threads serve the purpose of providing an outlet for all that nervous anxiety these kids are experiencing during the app season.
Good heavens…someone got into S with a 1700…what was his hook? performance? artistic talent? football throwing arm?
M2CK, remember this is all self reported data. Btw, have I told you I look like Hidei Klum, dance like Beyonce annd act like Meryl Streep? What are my chances at HYPSM? Oh, and I had a bad freshman year (my boyfriend dumped me) and an ok…ummm 2 years that it took me to complete um my like second year. Soooooo, will Harvard let me in cuz I am in Hosa?
@mom2collegekids He was a minority and went through extreme hardship growing up.
I agree with @mom2collegekids. The threads help with the nerves and students are well aware that they aren’t presenting the amount of info that admission officers receive. We all know the methodologies for things like GPA/rank vary and that academics get much more time in a formal application review than they do in chance threads.
I wrote a “Chance threads belong in the Chances forum” post a few years ago and it got pinned in the UVa forum (thanks to the admin responsible for that). I don’t love those threads pushing threads in which there are good conversations happening down, so I’m glad there is a separate forum.
This is why we strive to make sure chances threads are contained within the WAMC forum, and will move them (or close them) if we find them outside of their home. However, we know quite a few probably do make their way into the school-specific forums as well, and we need help in tracking them down since, as Dean J mentions, we don’t want them pushing out more fruitful discussion. Chances threads tend to be quite personal, and often benefit only the OP, so we do like to keep them separate whenever possible.
I have done that too. One can refine it further when schools publish their admit rate based the SAT/ACT scores. An example is when Princeton shows 20% chance for people with 2300+ scores or Brown shows 30% for perfect scorers.
Here’s my philosophy on chance threads: what these kids should really be asking–and would probably ask if they realized it–is “based on my qualifications, what colleges should I consider putting on my list?” There is often lots of helpful advice on “help me with my list threads,” including suggestions of colleges that the student (or parent) may not have considered. So when I respond to a “chance me” thread, as I sometimes do, I try to just treat it as a “help me with my list” request.
Perhaps the whole “Chances” forum could be renamed “Help Me With My College List.” That might shift the focus beneficially.
Silly me. When I saw that this was moved…I figured it was moved to the “chances” forum 
Chances threads should never be banned. They should be corralled together in a separate forum that can easily be avoided, like stripper joints in a red light district.
Well, that was an interesting analogy. Never heard chance threads likened to a red light district before!