

AcceptEdge Launches College Recommendation Engine To The Public - sgrove
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/acceptedge-launches-college-recommendation-engine-to-the-public/

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jsm386
Setting aside the issue of relying on a recommendation engine with
questionable data sources (your Facebook profile, and wherever they scraped
their college data from) to influence one of the most important decisions of
your life, I wonder how accurate their projections are for where you could get
in, based on your grades/scores.

"Your Personal Index is based on your family background, location, interests,
extracurriculars, essays, social network, and other related factors. "

I'd really be interested in how they weight _family background_. This makes a
huge difference at some schools, a big difference at others, and so on and so
on. Have they ranked colleges in this manner? Are they taking into account the
fact that many schools are facing massive budget holes and are thus more
likely to accept students who can pay their way? Source:
<http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/reed/>

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physcab
The problem that I have with this site is that it places emphasis on the
numbers. My GPA, SAT, and GRE were all crap compared to my peers. But my
college experience wasn't dependent on my numbers. I even wonder how
indicative these scores are of future success. I agree with the author that a
good college recommendation engine should show schools that you're likely to
be most happy at. I realize from a data perspective that that is much harder
to compute, but I feel it would be more worthwhile. Plus it seems like they
are cutting off a huge portion of the market by focusing on just the numbers.
What percentage of people would feel immediately discouraged by going to the
site if they knew their average GPA was less than the site average? Or even
more horrifying, what percentage of people will be left with the impression
that applying to college would be futile in the first place?

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skolor
Now that, I find interesting. I graduated as top of my class, with a 4.8, got
a 1490 on my SAT and a 34 on my ACT, and I only got a 310 for academics. What
exactly does it take to hit the top end for that thing?

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frisco
we've seen that weighted gpas are usually taken apart by the colleges and
don't matter as much -- it's highly dependent on unweighted gpa, though. if 10
years ago a school had 100 students applying with 4.0s, now there's over 1,000
(and we're seeing this in our dataset; it lines up with what we've been
hearing from the colleges).

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sachinag
Where do you get your data from? Why would the colleges _want_ to talk to you?

I'm really curious; I actually really love the idea of the service - anything
that does something to reduce the uncertainty around college admissions is all
right by me.

(I'm assuming you're at AcceptedEdge; you really should put _something_ in
your profile. It's really quite helpful.)

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frisco
Can't say too much right now, but we solve as many, if not more, problems for
colleges as we do for students. If you're applying now -- please tell us what
would make the site more helpful and useful! (My email's in my HN profile
now.) The great thing about being an early adopter is we listen carefully and
there's a good chance your suggestion will be coded up!

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mrshoe
It seems (unsurprisingly) that I wouldn't have a good shot at getting into the
same undergraduate program, just 10 years later.

Competition seemed pretty darn cutthroat at the time; it must be a nightmare
now.

