<p>I’m not sure how anyone can actually calculate whether you have a 10 or 50 or 95% chance of being accepted at a particular school. Here’s how I did it with my kids.</p>
<p>Look at the 25-75 percentile admissions stats for a particular school. If your stats are above the 75th percentile, that’s safety. Below 25th percentile, that’s reach. Middle 25-75 is match. Or you can do the same exercise off of the median/average stats rather than the middle 50%. </p>
<p>Basically, are you an average, above average or below average applicant. Plus, any school with a sub-20% acceptance rate is unpredictable (regardless of stats); so consider those reach-ey.</p>
<p>For our high school (and I have thought it is sort of competitive), the Naviance scattergram only tells you where you have zero chance (or in Asian’s saying: some chance in next life’s late afternoon). For our school, most of the top kids are clustered near upper right corner with similar GPA (close to 4) and > 2350 SAT. Many of these top kids are not definitely not going to HYP.
But according to ClassicRockerDad, the scattergram for his school is quite predictive - must be quite a high school (probably with severe grade deflation to separate the geniuses from the overachievers).</p>
<p>Many kids in our school have near perfect GPA (with a lot of APs) and near perfect SAT. From my experience, this does not mean jack. Your EC has better be outstanding - and I mean, outstanding. All of our HYP-bound kids have some kind of national/international awards/recognitions.</p>
<p>This is how I understand safety, match and reach when I give out chances.</p>
<p>Safety: 80-100%
Low match: 60-80%
Match: 40-60%
High match: 20-40%
Reach: 0-20% (as long as it is reachable)
High reach: 0% (I keep that verdict for the unreachable)</p>
<p>Funnydog, go to the Havard scattergram. Take your region as your GPA +/- 0.2 and your SAT +/- 50 points. </p>
<p>How many total dots? How many green dots? What’s the ratio of green dots to total dots?</p>
<p>Now expand the range to include your GPA +/- 0.3 and your SAT +/- 75 points. </p>
<p>How many total dots? How many green dots? What’s the ratio of green dots to total dots?</p>
<p>Now do that for all of the top schools and see if you see any school that either likes your HS more than the aggregate or dislikes your HS more than the aggregate.</p>
<p>Yes, I think that’s what a lot of us do when we look at Naviance.
However, for most of us, this exercise is just futile.
For example, let’s say you look at schools like HYP (picking extreme examples to illustrate my point), and use the corner where your GPA >= 3.9 and SAT >= 2350 (extreme upper right).
I believe our Naviance shows 6-7 years worth of data and generally there are 40-50 kids from our school applying to these uber schools every years.
You are looking at ~300 dots and therefore it is a little bit hard to read.
However, a glance will tell you that the green to red ratio is about 1 to 4 or 1 to 5.
In my opinion, 20%-25% chance is pretty slim - might as well be zero.
Perhaps, for your school, the same quadrant will yield 80% - now, that’s meaningful.</p>
<p>Therefore, I agree with some of the parents - for some of these very sought-after schools, you should treat them as extreme reach regardless of your stat. Of course, there are exceptions. If you are an Olympian or has performed in Carnegie Hall when you were 14, I think your chance is significantly enhanced. :)</p>
<p>That’s because the tests are centered on 500 for each test. Hence the 200 lowest score and 800 highest score. So the average score is supposed to be close to 1500. Just like IQ tests are centered so that 100 is average.</p>
<p>Yes, when I quote the 1500 number to friends and relatives, they seem surprised.
I think people expect the number to be around 1900? (quite of few weren’t happy with their kids when they came home with a score of ~2000)</p>
<p>I suspected that quite a few students who took SAT ended up punting on colleges?</p>
<p>20-25% is pretty significant when you consider overall it’s 6-8%. That’s pretty useful information if you’re clear headed. If you’re first choice is 20-25% that means that you have a 20-25% chance of going there. If you worked out the math for your list, you’ll find that to be one of the higher likelihoods.</p>
<p>If your stats are 25% for Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and you’ve taken out the GPA and SAT as factors, then you can approximate that you have a 58% chance of getting into one of them (1-0.75<em>0.75</em>0.75). How can that not be useful information.</p>
<p>I don’t agree that it works like that. I recalled there was a very long thread on exactly the same topic. I don’t think admission to various colleges are totally independent chances. My opinion is that if you are a high achiever without spectacular ECs, you should assume that there is a good chance that you will strike out on all the top schools. May be I am just fatalistic - but I do not envy kids (especially those who set their sight on “famous” schools) these days - it is a tough world out there. :)</p>
That calculation is only valid, if you assume either that colleges only care whether your GPA and SAT are in the listed range, making all other aspects of admission random, or you assume that the students within the GPA/SAT range all had equivalent non-stat portions of the app (course rigor, LORs, essays, ECs, awards, hook vs non-hook…). If either of these assumptions were true, then it would be easy to estimate your chance of admission accurately and we wouldn’t need to bother with ~25% chance estimates. The subjective non-stat criteria is what makes students within the same stat range have such varied admission results and what ultimately creates the approximately 25% rate instead of a very high probability of acceptance or rejection. </p>
<p>For example, you might find a pattern where the students within the listed GPA/SAT range that had weak ECs and LORs all had zero acceptances to HYP and similar highly selective schools. However, using your formula, the weak ECs/LORs student would expect to be admitted to either H, Y, or P; and if he applied to enough highly selective reaches, he’d be nearly guaranteed admission to at least one of them.</p>
<p>Admissions to college is not totally independent, but once you condition out GPA and SAT, it’s not a bad first-order approximation, and probably good enough to help you figure out what’s worth your time, how many applications to file, etc.</p>
<p>In the example above with 25%, assuming HYP as choices 1,2,3 you can approximate a 25% chance of attending H, a 19% chance of attending Y and a 14% chance of attending P. That leaves only 42% of going somewhere else. </p>
<p>If you then pick a 10% school like Stanford as a 4th choice, then there is only a 4% chance of going there, and that is borderline worth your time because there is still a 38% chance of going somewhere else. </p>
<p>Perhaps you might use 5% as your threshold and skip Stanford and spend your time on three 50% matches, call them AB and C. You end up with a 21% chance of going to A, an 11% chance of going to B, a 5% chance of going to C. You still have a 5% chance of going somewhere else, so perhaps you add a safety or two. </p>
<p>So at the end, the probability of attending each of the choices on your list are
H 25%
Y 19%
P 14%
A 21%
B 11%
C 5%
Safety 1 or Safety 2 5%</p>
<p>That’s all you really need. That’s a good list. 3 reaches, 3 matches, 2 safeties. Do a good job on these 6 applications and there is a 95% chance that you will attend a reach or a match. Safeties are only safeties if you can do an adequate job and still get in.</p>
<p>Of course ECs and LORs do factor in, and if you know that you’ve done absolutely nothing, or have bad LORs or have a suspension or two, then these should factor into your calculation. But in most cases, your ECs are probably fine, your LORs are probably fine, and you’ve been good. </p>
<p>People do sometimes get into their reaches. That’s why it’s worth applying to a few if they are your top choices. 25% is not zero.</p>
<p>This is a very useful thread as I was wondering the same thing. I was thinking anything under 50% is a reach unless your kid is a star athlete or otherwise a standout in some EC. Maybe that’s where the gradation of high match/low match comes into play.</p>
<p>A related question for me is what’s the rule of thumb when it comes to predicting scholarships, assuming you have some knowledge of the school’s availability of merit scholarships? For example, Tulane is noted for being fairly generous with merit scholarships. My son has somewhere in the 90-95% chance there (can’t remember the exact number). What’s the likelihood that Tulane would throw us a bone?</p>
<p>Not sure that I am allowed to say it here in CC (but here goes - use collegedata.com)</p>
<p>The site does require registration (free).
I think their chance engine is pretty interesting.
The data is from students using the site to enter their stats and track admission/rejection.
In this respect, it is better than Naviance since the data is international rather than just your local school.
It takes quite a bit of work to enter all the data (the chance engine asks for a lot of info including whether you are progeny of some potentates - which I think is quite relevant).
To be honest, I am not sure how accurate it is.
I remembered entering my daughter’s stat into the system for our state flagship school.
I vaguely remembered that the chance did not look very good - scared me to death (but she did get in).</p>
<p>Alas, I think this info is really difficult to tease out.
The only thing I can add is that most of the highly sought-after schools have need-blind admission policies. I think they will make sure you can afford to attend if you are admitted - the trick is to get admitted. :)</p>
I’ll use a real world example from the Stanford RD thread. When I analyzed the decisions earlier, I rated ECs and awards on a scale of 1 to 5 with the following definitions: 5 = impressive on national level, 4 = state level, 3 = regional level, 2 = school level, and 1 = just participation. The number had a strong correlation with acceptance rate among high stat posters. 4+ had a very high acceptance rate, and 0-1s had a very low acceptance rate. 2s and 3s were somewhere in between, with a very different rate between 2s and 3s. Unique background, including URM or low-SES, also had a strong correlation with acceptance. It’s quite possible that, if your school had a 10% acceptance rate among a particular GPA/SAT group, all of those 10% who got in were in these strong correlation with acceptance groups – state+ level ECs/awards or had a unique background, including URM or low-SES. The acceptance rate is going to be far lower than 10% among the majority of the members of the GPA/SAT group that don’t have these unique characteristics, so if someone without these unique characteristics estimates his chances as 10%, it’s most likely going to be way off. </p>
<p>Another issue is sample size. Many high schools do not have a statistically significant number of applicants to specific colleges within specific GPA + SAT ranges, particularly if you do not go back many years to when overall acceptance rates differed. When I applied to colleges, my GPA + SAT were in the 0% acceptance rate group among students in my HS for all ivies + Stanford + MIT. Nevertheless, I was accepted to 4 out of 5 that I applied to. If I had I used your system, I would have missed out on a lot of opportunities.</p>
I recalled there was a very long thread on exactly the same topic. I don’t think admission to various colleges are totally independent chances. My opinion is that if you are a high achiever without spectacular ECs, you should assume that there is a good chance that you will strike out on all the top schools. May be I am just fatalistic - but I do not envy kids (especially those who set their sight on “famous” schools) these days - it is a tough world out there. :)</p>