These are excellent points! I ended up changing the Northeastern thread title to be: “Northeastern Class of 2025 — Regular Decision Date: by April 1”. I know that looks like I completely ignored your answer, so I wanted to explain the reasoning in more detail.
Totally understand that. It completely confused me too when I first visited CC. But it’s pretty clear students who are applying to college are used to this terminology. You can see it in the body of the Northeastern thread started by a high-school senior:
hi y’all ik its kinda early but i haven’t seen an rd thread for northeastern for class of 2025 so i thought i’d make one :)) we can talk ab stats, questions, app process, and results when they eventually come out
We’d like to go back and edit older thread titles so that it’s easier to find historical information too. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits from previous years and standardizing on a date format will help people find them.
That’s true for many schools. But again this is information students are searching for. One of the reasons we’ve been gathering decision dates is that many people are looking for that bit of information. As schools start releasing decisions, I plan to go back and update the titles with that information too. Again, we think it’ll have historical value as well.
I’ve decided not to start new threads for that reason. If someone else starts a thread, that’s fine. But I found that even starting polls was enough to get students stressed out. I think adding the date based on our best available information is a service we can provide.
I do like the idea of pinning these threads. I seem to always forget to do that, but I will try in the future. And It does, perhaps, make sense to move the actual decision date to the beginning of the post. It might even make sense to make it editable like we have done with some Musical Theater threads (e.g., MT Acceptances By School For The Class of 2025). That way I won’t have to update it whenever there is new information.
We’re still playing with other variations to see which work best. We have hard data for this, but it does take some time to see the results. If it turns out we aren’t seeing the sort of change we expect, we can revisit the title template.