Beware of AcceptEdge College Predictor: It Doesn’t Work!

By San, on September 22nd, 2009

The Quick Review

AcceptEdge is a just-launched (but still in beta) website that aims to predict the college that best fits your academic profile and personal interests. The problem? It doesn’t work! As far as I can tell, none of the information you enter in has any bearing on the results, which for some reason always seem to favor George Washington University.

Academic Profile

This is obviously supposed to be heart of the product: enter in your GPA, class rank, and standardized test scores, and it should give you schools that are appropriate for you academically. To test it, I first entered extremely high scores, while entering “I don’t care” for school preferences like size, greek life, and urban vs rural:

Unweighted GPA: 4
Weighted GPA: 6.1
Class Rank: Valedictorian
Number of AP Exams: 5
SAT scores: 800-800-800

High1

As you can see, AcceptEdge returns very high Academic and Personal Index scores of 930 and 850 (more on these later), and an “Edge Score” of 890. It also recommends GWU, Carnegie Mellon, and Northwestern as the top choices. Not exactly the schools I would have expected for the given academic profile, but fine.

Next, I plugged in these low values:

Unweighted GPA: 1
Weighted GPA: 1
Class Rank: Bottom 50%
Number of AP Exams: 0
SAT scores: 200-200-200

Low

As you might expect, the index scores (310 and 388) as well as the Edge Score (349) are low. But look at the schools they recommend: the first six choices are exactly the same!

Facebook Connect and Personal Interest

If the perfunctory Academic Profile feature hasn’t turned you off already, the Personal Interests section doesn’t work either. At first glance, it sounds cool: enter in your interests, such as favorite books and movies, and it will compare them to the Facebook profiles of students who currently attend these colleges. It will even automatically fetch your interests through Facebook Connect if you enter in your Facebook login.

But again, it doesn’t work. I entered completely different personal interests several times, and it returned the same college results each time – even the same Personal Index!

This is a shame, too, because the personal profile can definitely go a long way in helping you decide your best-fit college. The student’s current high school, for example, can be a great indicator if it is handled correctly. College admissions officers give students at more competitive high schools, such as Phillips Exeter or Horace Mann, more consideration over students at lesser-known schools with similar GPAs. AcceptEdge could someday incorporate in this bias, based on the relative GPA averages of students from different high schools who attend the same college.

———-

Right now, it is way too premature to start making wishlists for new features. AcceptEdge needs to fix their broken product, and now. I realize it is still in beta, but this is the peak college application season, and students are looking for any tools they can get their hands on to help them decide where to spend their next four years. Let’s hope they don’t use this one, at least until it’s ready for prime time.