VoidSix wrote:eire1013 wrote:VoidSix wrote:I don't trust LSP ever since it said I have a 76% chance at Stanford (apparently I'm an "admit"). Everywhere else is a coin toss or less, and I refuse to be optimistic.
Welcome to the funhouse.
the % given by lsp has nothing to do with percent chance of acceptance, but everyone seems to think so. all it means is the percentage of current students whose number are belowe your own (which itself is a decent indicator of application strength. lsp offers no % chance, just the "accept, consider, deny, etc." categories
I understand how the system works, and I think it's flawed, because YC DOES consider that to be a chance of admission. That's why he has it set to say "Consider / Strong Consider / Admit."
i asked him about that when he had his "open chat hours" several days ago on LSP, and he told me the % should not be viewed as chance of admission, but instead like the above poster said just a general "indicator of app strength" relative to the pool that ultimately goes to that school.
2 main reasons why it isn't a straight up % chance:
- the percentage figure you get is for matriculating students, not admits. in general (not just for HLS), if you take a school's two groups "admitted students" and "matriculating students," the former group will as a whole have better numbers than the latter, because the former is composed of "matriculating students" + "students who got into a higher ranked school and went to it instead". thus the overall profile for the matriculating group isn't as impressive, but that's what is used for the LSP percentage. so, in theory this would inflate the percentage it gives you somewhat, since it's comparing you against a weaker overall group.
the smaller a school's yield is, the greater this effect is, because there will be a greater disparity between the two groups. of course here we're talking about HLS which for obvious reasons has a very high yield so this effect is probably minimal, but as a general evaluation of LSP i think it's pretty important.
- there might be certain points along the "spectrum" at which you are simply an auto-admit for a given school, yet there could still very well be students applying (and attending) who have higher numbers than you. say a school auto-admits anyone with an index of 10 or above. but, 20% of matriculating students have a 10 or above. if you have a 10 and plug into LSP, it'll tell you 80% (since 20% of the matriculating class beats you), which will be misleading because you actually have (essentially) a 100% chance of being admitted.
again this is probably mitigated at HLS because it's questionable whether anybody is a HLS auto-admit. but it's something that also is pretty important for LSP as a whole