College Chancing sites reviews

Applying to College
1

When my son began his college search he used various college chancing sites to get an idea of where he might be accepted. Now that his search is over, it’s interesting to look at the actual results vs. the predictions from these sites and I’m curious to find out about the experiences that others had with these sites and if they were accurate. My son applied at 5 schools and these were the chances he received from a few of the sites:

Parchment.com:
UW - Madison 46%
Minnesota - Twin Cities 87%
UW - Eau Claire 77%
UW - La Crosse 58%
Iowa State 97%

UW - Madison 76%
Minnesota - Twin Cities 33%
UW - Eau Claire 86%
UW - La Crosse 86%
Iowa State 79%

Another site he looked at was Collegedata.com, but the chances were to vague (low, medium, high), they didn’t ask enough questions, and didn’t give specific % chances. So, not including those results.

The actual decisions he received from these colleges are as follows:

UW - Madison: Denied after being postponed
Minnesota - Twin Cities: Denied after being waitlisted
UW - Eau Claire: Accepted
UW - LaCrosse: Accepted
Iowa State: Accepted

So, a few thoughts. Both sites were fairly accurate in regards to the 3 schools where my son was accepted. Although admitster %'s for these schools are curious. Iowa State has an auto admit policy based on a formula. So, it should be very easy to predict chances for that school. My son easily met the standards of the formula and so should have gotten 100% chance on both sites. Admitster also gave UW - Eau Claire and UW - LaCrosse equal chances. UW-La Crosse has a lower acceptance rate is generally harder to get into than UW - Eau Claire.

Both sites varied greatly on the two schools where my son was denied. Not sure what to make of this.

Summary - Neither site did great, but I would give Parchment a slightly higher score than Admitster even though they were way off on Minnesota. I also think Parchment provides better data in regards to seeing data from other people and graphing it out. It seems like if you receive a chance of 60%-70% or better on multiple sites for a school, then you can have some hope of being accepted. Other than that, not sure there about the accuracy, especially for students like my son (with average stats).

I’d be curious to hear other applicants experiences with these sites.

2

GIGO: garbage in, garbage out

3

Well…it may be “garbage out”, but it’s not really “garbage in”. They ask for many of the same things that colleges ask for (GPA, class rank, test scores, EC activity - although not sure how they quantify EC activity, etc). I understand that these sites are by no means perfect and the results should probably be taken with a grain of salt. However, I find the discrepancy in results between the two sites interesting and I’m just curious what kind of chances others received and if they were at all in line with what the actual results ended up being.

4

I like this post. I mostly used college data and college niche scattergrams, but I took them with a grain of salt. In terms of reliability, it was pretty good at pegging match and safety schools. She applied to 7 of those in total, and got into 6, waitlisted at one. I didn’t trust its reach predictions at all. It gave the same “reachometer”(lack of better word) for Brown as it did for Bates. Pretty safe to say that it wasn’t accurate for that.

5

It’s ‘Garbage In’ in that these predictions are based on a non-representative dataset of people who volunteered to contribute their stats and admissions outcomes.