8
2 years ago
Admissions Advice

Chancing accuracy
Answered

Hi there - Does anyone have any real life experience with how accurate the chancing calculator is at CollegeVine compared to PrepScholar or College Confidential? What about the Niche scattergrams? Thanks in advance to this very knowledgeable group!

chancingaccuracy
accurate
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3 answers

-1
Accepted Answer
2 years ago

Welcome! To start off: nothing will be completely 100% accurate no one, formula or chancing calculator can predict your admissions chances, here's why: you never know what the admissions officers/college is looking for. Your chance could be 50% one year but 25% another year. These chancing calculators cannot predict the future, only make inferences looking at the past.

Although, the collegevine calculator uses more information to look at your chances (such as gender, extracurriculars, etc. ) That could make it more realistic than a chancing calculator that just uses test scores and GPA.

In summary, no chancing calculators will be 100% accurate, so just make your applications the best they can be and don't be afraid to apply to a school a chancing calculator says it is impossible to get in to! Who knows, you may just get lucky ;)

Hope this helps! :)

-1
4
2 years ago

College Vines chancing algorithm is the most sophisticated and comprehensive amongst all the competition and I believe the use some machine learning or AI to power it up. CV uses like 25 + data points and you get a pretty good result.

All the other chancing calcs. simply use only 2 to 4 data points, typically GPA, SAT or ACT, race and public or private high school. They are all garbage and I don't mean this to be mean. Last cycle I was admitted to Columbia University I had a chancing range of 37-46% from CV. For my safeties which I never got to apply since I got in ED, I had like 80% at Tulane and Colgate. Now on College Confidential I have a 6% chance at all 3. I think you would agree with me that that is a garbage answer. CC claims you won't get a better percentage unless you pay money and subscribe. Niche and PrepScholar only use GPA and SAT/ACT score but the results are better. So on those they will just tell you that you are in the 75% percentile of admits, applicants etc but nothing more granular than that.

Considering that top schools like Stanford and Harvard and the other Ivys, Elites and Liberal arts colleges use between say 75 and 200 data points, I don't think you will ever get a really accurate read on your chances through any online calculator. The best way you can compare yourself to other applicants at those schools is to a.) study the common data sets for each of the schools your are applying to, b.) study the score cards for some of the schools and see how you would score yourself if you were an admissions officers or c.) have a professional college advisor who knows how the colleges you are interested in work, give you a file read and see what they think about how strong your application is. The best answer will come from a former admissions officer from the college you are applying to but unless you personally know them, they are not going to do anything of the sort for you.

If you take some time to do some research you can find articles, videos and examples of everything I've mentioned.

Good luck.

4
0
2 years ago

CollegeVine is a good calculator compared to other calculators but it is not a good calculator in general. If you want a good calculator, try to ask AO's you know. CollegeVine generalizes your EC and doesn't look at the context of your school. It also doesn't take into account your essays.

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Your chancing factors
Unweighted GPA: 3.7
1.0
4.0
SAT: 720 math
200
800
| 800 verbal
200
800

Extracurriculars

Low accuracy (4 of 18 factors)

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