Form is live now. Congratulations to all those who have good news already. Best wishes to those who have not yet gotten your slice of good news.

Here is one interesting blog post that tries to put some math on this question. http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/01/08/game-theory-tuesdays-how-can-i-find-true-love/#.VOy4MvnF_jI I cannot find it right now, but I recall reading a similar post somewhere about applying this same approach to house hunting.

So for example, after I've shopped online, I have stamina to visit only about 10-15 houses in person before I need to make a decision. So as I understand it, this math suggests I should find 5 possible houses online, and visit all 5 with an open mind, but reject them all no matter how great they seem. Then, I should just keep visiting more houses until I find one that I like *better* than any of the 5 I previously rejected.

If I'm understanding that math wrong, please let me know because it's how I make most of my decisions now!

Below are links to a tool for counting 2015 admissions results. The counting tool will go live over the weekend, so please enter only real data. If you want to wait to enter your child's results all at one time next week, that's probably most accurate. If you instead want to enter results piecemeal as you receive them, that's fine too, but try not to double-count since that just makes things confusing. As is probably obvious, this counting process is pretty free-form. Since you are the ones entering the data, it's up to you to control the accuracy of your responses.

Here is a link to a simple survey tool, so people can log their admission results for 2015. http://goo.gl/1lziV8
Here is a direct link to a summary of the current results. http://goo.gl/AVjxuc
Here is a link to a summary of last year's (2014) results. http://goo.gl/t6o16D

You will see that I listed only a limited number of schools, and dropped some from last time. This is due to a lack of many results for those schools. If there are schools you want me to add back next year, there is a spot at the end of the form to list them. At the end of the form, there is a spot to identify waitlist spots that might open. Please use it to let other waitlisted people know what might open up.

Also, as is DCUM tradition, people of course should feel free to bypass the survey, and just post results to this thread free form.

Good luck to everyone. May all your envelopes be fat.

Anonymous wrote:is it time to clear out the fake results and make way for the actual ones?

I'm just doing that now. Please don't post any more fake results.

The survey is live now.

Anonymous wrote:lol@ may all your envelopes be fat.

I can't take credit -- I stole that from someone else.

Below are links to a tool for counting 2014 admissions results. The counting tool is live now, so please enter only real data. If you want to wait to enter your child's results all at one time next week, that's probably most accurate. But if you want to enter results piecemeal as you receive them, that's fine too, but try not to double-count since that just makes things confusing. As is probably obvious, this counting process is pretty free-form. Since you are the ones entering the data, it's up to you to control the accuracy of your responses.

Here is a link to a simple survey tool, so people can log their admission results for 2014. http://goo.gl/oLtFU1
Here is a direct link to a summary of the current results. http://goo.gl/t6o16D
Here is a link to a summary of last year's (2013) results. http://goo.gl/R1h6L

You will see that I listed only a limited number of schools, and dropped some from last time. This is due to a lack of many results for those schools. If there are schools you want me to add back next year, there is a spot at the end of the form to list them. At the end of the form, there is a spot to identify waitlist spots that might open. Please use it to let other waitlisted people know what might open up.

Also, as is DCUM tradition, people of course should feel free to bypass the survey, and just post results to this thread free form.

Good luck to everyone. May all your envelopes be fat.

In case anyone is interested, I updated the short survey so people applying to schools can share information with each other about how many schools (and which ones) they are applying to. The survey contains just three questions (grade, number of schools, names of schools). All responses are anonymous, and there is no published cross-reference that might allow others to decipher which particular array of schools anyone applied to. If you want to see what the results will look like before responding, you should be able to click on the RESULTS link below to see the responses. (I seeded the survey with a few fake responses which I will remove later as real responses arrive.)

Please identify each school only once to avoid duplicate information. Please respond only if you are applying to schools during this admissions cycle. Please don't litter the survey with fake responses, since that just wastes everyone's time. And please recognize that the responses people post here represent only a small sliver of the applicant pool, so while you may be able to draw some information from the response numbers, use that information with caution.

-- SURVEY
-- RESULTS

To read earlier discussion about this survey, here are links to 2012-13 and 2011-12.

I probably will not have time to add any other schools for 2013-14, but if you list other schools in this thread, I will try to add them for next year. Please be patient with me. I recall from years past that it usually takes me 2-3 tries to get this form working right. If you see problems, please post them here.

Please be considerate of others. Good luck this season.

Sam2

It seems like what OP is describing is a revealed preference analysis of schools. I think that would be very interesting to see. I'm not sure I agree with OP's assumptions about how the revealed preference analysis would turn out though.

I agree with OP's underlying point that finding the right school for each child is important, and that the right school fit might be different for different families.

Let me clarify: I'm not particularly focused on proving or disproving that legacy affects admissions. There's lots of research showing it does have an effect, and many colleges freely admit it. How much effect legacy actually has is often debated, and I think it has less impact than many people assume. So maybe that's worth exploring, but it's more efficient to rely on others' research into that topic rather than creating my own.

I think what I was envisioning is looking at the question of whether legacy has a big impact at particular schools. In some respects, it would be a backdoor way of assessing whether or not certain schools have lots of legacies skewing their college results, or instead if the college results seem unaffected (which would suggest legacy plays little role on how those particular schools' students do at college admissions).

I acknowledge the confounding variable problem someone pointed out. If one school's college admissions results do not correlate with academic results, I cannot know whether the lack of correlation is due to legacy effects, or affirmative action, or athletics, or something else. That's makes things harder. I suppose if the correlation is about the same for different schools though, then that would suggest all those other potentially confounding factors are really not very significant as a practical matter, or at least cancel one another out.

Note that many do not consider Ms. Sommers an honest broker on these issues. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hoff_Sommers

Anonymous wrote:If this is simply an academic exercise, go for it.

If you think it will in any way inform your kid's college acceptance, you are nuts.

Have no fear, I don't do any of this stuff thinking it's a meaningful guide in how I educate/raise my child. It's just a hobby, albeit perhaps a silly one.

Anonymous wrote:I am fairly confident that someone has done this analysis before in a more rigorous manner than what you are proposing, unless you are a statistician or academic.

Yes, good point. I'd like to think someone with access to better data (and likely even insider data) would have done this better than I ever could. Also, since I'm just doing it as a hobby, I'd expect someone who actually gets paid to do this sort of thing would do it better. I'll check Google Scholar before I embark on anything.

DCUM, I need your help thinking through an approach to some data crunching. I was thinking this morning about college admissions and the legacy factor. Many people here question whether college admissions from top high schools are driven by a strong academic profile (SAT, GPA, etc), or instead by legacy. I was wondering whether it's feasible to construct a data set that tests the correlation between college admissions and other objective (non-legacy) scores. I have pretty good data on college admissions to most area high schools (about 10 yrs of data), and I have good data on NMSF success (which is a pretty good proxy for academic success) (15 yrs of data), so I should be able to test the correlation, right? If the correlation is strong, then that suggests academic factors are the big drivers to college admissions success. If the correlation is low, then that can give some better sense of whether other factors like legacy or athletics plays a bigger role.

I suspect there is lots of correlation between college admissions and academics, but it's not perfect, because surely there are other factors that affect college admissions. I'm wondering whether the correlation is stronger or weaker for particular schools.

This is all half-baked and might not really work. I need constructive feedback on how best to develop such an analysis, and whether it might show anything useful. Fire away.

Sam2

Everything looks like it's working fine, so I just wiped the fake data. The counting tool is live now. Please enter only real data. Links are in the original post on this thread. Best luck to everyone this season.

Anonymous wrote:Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say that your confidence in the Examiner data is based on its consistency with other data? I'm trying to understand how consistency with the reported data on, for example, National Merit semi-finalists (more reliable, I would say, than SAT data since the College Board releases a list of NMSFs) provides any real confidence in the SAT data? Yes, given the percentage of NMSFs, it's entirely possible that the average SAT is composite 2100, but isn't it also possible that it's much lower and that the students recognized as NMSFs were outliers on the high end.

Let me try to explain my reasoning. When I look at the objectively verifiable Sidwell data, I see several years worth of data in several categories that place its students among the top few independent schools in DMV in terms of academic performance. These categories include NMSF% (15+ years of data), Presidential Scholar data (10-11 years of data), and AMC Math Contest data (8 years of data). So when I find a 1400 SAT average from a reasonably credible source (a published Washington Examiner article as opposed to an anonymous online post), and that SAT average is similar to the SAT averages from others in the top few independent schools, I see that consistency as adding to the credibility of the 1400 number. If the Washington Examiner article had pegged Sidwell's SAT average at 1200 or 1600, I'd see the number as an outlier compared to how Sidwell students perform in other academic measures, so I'd wonder about the difference. I hope that helps explain my reasoning.

To be clear, I'm not trying to argue about which schools are the academic tops. All of these schools are very strong academically, and the differences in numbers I track are often marginal. I also think that if you choose a school for your child based on some number in a spreadsheet, you're making an uninformed choice.