How do you think about acceptance rate?

NiceUnparticularMan
Tue, 29 Oct 2024 13:31:21 +0000

Mwfan1921:

Schools receive a student’s info when the student adds the school to their My Colleges list on the common app, so there’s that. So, if the add happens on Dec 15, a school could see that as suspect, especially if there had been no other engagement with the school prior to then (mailing list registration, virtual or in-person visit, etc.)

That makes sense and I have heard suggestions like that before. I note Middlebury does say it considers “Level of applicant’s interest” in its CDS, so I guess that is fair warning anything they have the ability to see could be taken into account.

Mwfan1921:

but I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from the head to head results.

Just to be clear, at least in this context I wasn’t suggesting people take too seriously the percentages they report. I was just using them for a much more limited purpose, seeing how many matchups they have at all.

To my knowledge they don’t report that directly, but when they generate a report it can come in three flavors.

If the numbers are red and green, it means they are at least claiming they have enough matchups in their data for a statistically significant result (“If the results are in color, then the difference is statistically significant at a 95% confidence level.”). I note even in those cases, they will report error ranges, and sometimes the ranges overlap, meaning you don’t actually know who should be red or green. But in any event, red/green numbers mean they are claiming to have a decent number of matchups in their data.

If the numbers are grey, it means they have some matchups, but not enough to claim their results are statistically significant. Again there will be error ranges, and as expected those tend to be very large for grey number results.

Finally, there may be no numbers at all, and they will then say, “No matchups yet. Please try another search.” So that presumably means no matchups at all in their data, which as I noted before doesn’t mean there were no cross-admits in the real world. There just weren’t any reported to Parchment.

I want to emphasize I fully agree this is not very high quality data. Still, if a St Olaf and a Connecticut College have no matchups, I do think this is at least some confirmation of the plausible hypothesis there are not a large number of kids applying to both of those specific colleges.

In contrast, if you run Cal and UCLA, not only are the numbers in color, the error bars are relatively small. Again, I would also advise taking those numbers with a grain of salt. But I do think this is some confirmation of the plausible hypothesis a lot of kids apply to both of those specific colleges.

And so on.