Statistics 101: Determining Your Probability of Acceptance
In Part 1 of my Final Countdown series, I talked about how to make an initial list of colleges you’re interested in applying to. Now, of course, you should apply where you want to. But you also need a list of schools that have varying probabilities of accepting you. No matter how smart you are, applying to only Ivy League schools could easily end up in you not getting accepted everywhere. That said, you should also not just apply to schools you know you’ll get into; you should challenge yourself a bit.
Guidance counselors usually recommend that you apply to a combination of “safety schools” (schools to which you will probably be accepted), “target schools” (schools to which you have a decent chance, say 50%, of being accepted), and “reach schools” (schools to which you are statistically unlikely to gain acceptance).
I applied to fifteen schools; Amherst, Claremont McKenna, Colby, Dartmouth, Emory, Georgetown, Harvard, UMich, Princeton, Rice, SUNY Binghamton, Vanderbilt, Wesleyan, Williams and Yale. These schools have a variety of acceptance rates, so I’m hedging my bets that I will be accepted into at least one.
There is no set formula to determine which category (safety, target, reach) a school fits into. Generally, the lower the acceptance rate, the more likely the school is going to be a reach or target school. Obviously this is a general rule of thumb that will vary by applicant. There are useful tools for helping determine which category a school fits into. Naviance is internet based software that tracks every college application from your high school and allows you to see your statistics (GPA and test scores) graphed against past applicants from your high school. You can see who was accepted and rejected to each college, so it gives a relatively accurate picture of the general standards that college wants to see from your high school. Obviously colleges don’t admit students solely based on GPA and test scores, so Naviance doesn’t necessarily accurately predict your acceptance to colleges.
Mychances provides a free alternative to Naviance and offers many of the same features. After you sign up for a free account and enter some basic academic information (class rank, SAT scores, GPA, etc), it will assign you a “Selectivity Index.” You can then add colleges (most in the US are covered) to your profile, and it will tell you your chances of being accepted to these schools. A friend who used Mychances told me that it correctly predicted responses from 9 out of the 11 schools she applied to. Mychances is also useful in that it tells you what it’s accuracy has been in the past of predicting acceptances from each school.
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