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The Penn Group's college admission chances calculator considers 9 factors when determining a candidate's chances of being admitted to a particular college: GPA, SAT Score, high school classes, teacher recommendations, admission essay, extracurricular activities, affiliation with the college or university, minority status, and application effort.
The actual weights assigned to each factor vary by school. For instance, the Ivies and the more prominent liberal arts schools weigh legacy more than state schools, and notorious "hard-working" colleges like Cornell and Binghamton weigh GPA and high school classes more heavily than other colleges. In all cases, SAT score and GPA are weighted most.
Once a student has answered the calculator's questions online, a raw score is calculated, which is then multiplied by a "difficulty multiplier" that has been assigned to each college. The difficulty multiplier, which ranges from .75 to 1.25, ensures two things:
(1) that not even the most highly qualified student will have a perfect chance of admission to any top school
(2) that students whose raw scores would not qualify them for top schools still have accurate predictions for schools with higher admission rates.
The last consideration the calculator makes is whether the selected schools are Ivies or Ivy-equivalent. We include this "Ivy Factor" because initial beta testing found that the machine predicted slightly higher numbers than we thought accurate for the most competitive colleges. The reason for this upwards skew, we realized, is that highly selective colleges often weight SAT score far more than any other factor. Thus, we instituted a penalty on students who get less than a 2100 on their SATs. We have found that this "Ivy Factor" has improved the accuracy of predictions dramatically. Its only flaw comes into play when students get between a 2040 and 2090 on their SATs, as their predicted chances may be slightly lower than we would have liked.
All in all, we feel that the calculator is an accurate projection of whether a student will gain admission to a given school based on the experiences that we at the Penn Group have had.
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