

Show HN: Calculate full scholarships available based on your grades - rhc2104
http://www.collegemerit.com/

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jrockway
Pretty abysmal list, even with a 4.0 GPA and perfect scores on every exam.

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ubernostrum
Pretty abysmal idea, really.

Granted I graduated over a decade ago, but I recall scholarships not generally
being tied to either grades or test scores. Many public universities will
grant automatic _admission_ based on those (and a few years back I got to
write a calculator that compared universities in a region based on their
standards for that), but _scholarships_ seemed to be very rarely awarded based
solely on those factors.

(during my own school search I went through multiple on-site scholarship-
application programs, which typically involved analyzing my full high-school
transcript, followed by on-site interviews and exams tailored specifically to
the school)

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itafroma
> Pretty abysmal idea, really.

Please keep toxic comments like this as far away from Show HN as possible.

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cloudwalking
Ubernostrum is referring to "scholarships available based on grades" as a bad
idea, not the OP's link.

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dfc
Are the forums from collegeconfidential.com a good/trust-worthy source of
data? I am not very familiar with the site but it seems like anecdata at best.
Looking at some of the postings it seems like there is disagreement over the
validity of the figures some people have provided.

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rhc2104
I double checked all of the listings myself, and only included scholarships
that covered full tuition or more.

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dfc
I would definitely put that somewhere on the site instead of the link to
cc.com that leaves people wondering how legitimate your numbers are.

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bryanbuckley
Enlightening.

Also, imo this explains why the University of Alabama has been attracting so
many amazing people the past 6 years^. _They implemented an automatic
qualifying scholarship at least that many years ago (presidential) in addition
to probably the best national merit scholarship in the country_ (free tuition,
iPad, $1000 stipend per year, $2000 for summer research or study abroad, 1
year of free housing, not to mention your college will probably give you
another scholarship)

But then again this just shows automatic scholarships I guess. Otherwise other
universities make more discretionary decisions.

^ bias, I went to school there in that time frame.

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pattle
I don't live in America so I haven't been through the school/college system
here so I didn't know what either of the fields meant. Perhaps you could have
some kind of tooltip telling you what to enter into each field (it took me
about 5 attempt to get the form to submit because I kept entering wrong
values). Although I guess the people using it will know what to enter but even
so a little tooltip is always nice.

Also when I failed the validation the values I entered disappeared which is a
bit frustrating.

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Evernoob
The site wipes the content of the inputs if I submit without enough
information.

Since I'm not American and don't know what the score ranges should be, can you
put a little tooltip or addendum to explain the test and what it's scored out
of?

I was interested in poking around to see if I would have scored scholarships
anywhere in America if I input similar grades to what I achieved in Australia
but the lack of usability made me quit.

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rhc2104
Thanks for the feedback. The site no longer wipes the inputs clean on a
validation error.

The SAT has three subtests with scores ranging from 200 to 800. Scores are
multiples of 10.

The ACT has a score from 1 to 36.

You only need either an ACT or SAT score.

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jerrickhoang
well this is quite upsetting

