MIT is weighing in on high school admissions
/By Joyce Szuflita
OOOOWW! MIT. How fancy!
Over the years, first we were so thankful for the crumbs: the clumsy Applicant : Seat ratio to guess at our chances at popular schools that were 30:1.
Then parents forced the DoE to reveal the random number, but they didn’t build context.
NOW MIT to the rescue with a very large but (to my limited mind) not terribly complicated combination of data to tell each student if a specific school is a long shot, medium shot, or pretty good shot. (Also no guarantees in the fine print.)
They are taking the number of seats at each program, and their admissions priorities, and an applicants screened group or Ed Opt group, and their random number and whether they are Gen Ed or SWD and feeding it into Big Blue to tell us if a school is a safety or a reach.
I should be grateful, and I will be if it helps parents make a good, balanced list.
Update: so now we have one year experience with the “MIT bars” and it looks very good. It is not a very nuanced system but it turns out that knowing which programs have “3 bars” (where you have a 99% chance of “getting in” based on your tier, random number and the school’s past admissions data) is wildly helpful in making sure that a student’s list is broad enough. It also helps in ‘expectation management’. Rather than expecting and dreaming about a “hail Mary pass” that would never happen and having a stressful disappointing outcome revealed in March - students can spend the 6 months between Oct and March really vetting, and becoming accustomed to the thoughtful worthy schools where they can actually get into. The improvement in mental health is immeasurable.
Knowledge is power.
