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With about 2,400 four-year universities located in the U.S., high school students may find the actual process of applying to college as anxiety inducing as waiting for an acceptance letter.
Startup Splash Networks wants to make selecting schools to send an application to easier. On Tuesday, the company is launching a Facebook app called AdmissionSplash that shows prospective college students how likely it is that they will be admitted to each school on their lists.
The app asks students for their basic information: test scores, address, and other factors that affect admissions, like whether they volunteer or play sports. It then uses an algorithm to give users a desirability rating as well as the likelihood, ranging from “very poor” to “very good,” of getting into the schools. Admission Splash currently runs customized equations for about 1,500 schools that it developed using the admission data they release.
Admissions offices often paint a picture of case-by-case application analysis that can’t be narrowed down to an equation. “Although high school grade point average and standardized test scores are important indicators of academic achievement used in UCLA’s admissions review, they only tell part of the story,” advertises UCLA’s prospective student website, for instance.
But AdmissionSplash’s equation, which definitely doesn’t take essays into account, has been pretty accurate in tests that use publicly available admissions profiles. In the case of UCLA, approximately 85% of students the app said would get admitted actually did.
The sample sizes of these tests are fairly small (73 people for the UCLA test), so I wouldn’t suggest posting AdmissionSplash results on one’s Facebook page before getting an acceptance letter. Using the tool as a way to compare schools’ competitiveness or to share a list of prospective schools with friends, on the other hand, seems like a win.
With about 2,400 four-year universities located in the U.S., high school students may find the actual process of applying to college as anxiety inducing as waiting for an acceptance letter.
Startup Splash Networks wants to make selecting schools to send an application to easier. On Tuesday, the company is launching a Facebook app called AdmissionSplash that shows prospective college students how likely it is that they will be admitted to each school on their lists.
The app asks students for their basic information: test scores, address, and other factors that affect admissions, like whether they volunteer or play sports. It then uses an algorithm to give users a desirability rating as well as the likelihood, ranging from “very poor” to “very good,” of getting into the schools. Admission Splash currently runs customized equations for about 1,500 schools that it developed using the admission data they release.
Admissions offices often paint a picture of case-by-case application analysis that can’t be narrowed down to an equation. “Although high school grade point average and standardized test scores are important indicators of academic achievement used in UCLA’s admissions review, they only tell part of the story,” advertises UCLA’s prospective student website, for instance.
But AdmissionSplash’s equation, which definitely doesn’t take essays into account, has been pretty accurate in tests that use publicly available admissions profiles. In the case of UCLA, approximately 85% of students the app said would get admitted actually did.
The sample sizes of these tests are fairly small (73 people for the UCLA test), so I wouldn’t suggest posting AdmissionSplash results on one’s Facebook page before getting an acceptance letter. Using the tool as a way to compare schools’ competitiveness or to share a list of prospective schools with friends, on the other hand, seems like a win.
image courtesy of iStockphoto, sshepard
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