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[quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My family has worked with EV twice. The first time was when our child was born and we were considering where to buy a home. The second time was when we were applying to preschool, after we had attended about 20 open houses, identified schools that we were interested in, and just needed a sounding board for ranking the schools.

We were one of many OOB families W/O sibling who put Brent as #1 on our list because we believed that we should rank schools ONLY according to preference. We did not consider admissions data from previous years that showed the number of IB families (even with sibling) who had been shut out of Brent preschool. EV informed me that if we kept Brent as our #1 choice, we would be essentially throwing out the slot ([b]and possibly reducing our chances at another school, which someone else listed as #1 if they had a better lottery number[/b]). I listened to EV and removed Brent altogether, moving Inspired Teaching (initially our second choice) to #1. We are now at Inspired Teaching and very, very, very glad for the advice that we received.

For us, the small fee paid for the mini-session to help with the order of the schools was money well spent.

[/quote]

FYI, if you had put Brent as #1 and IT as #2 on your lottery submission then the result would have been exactly the same: admission at IT. Her advice, as you understood it, had zero impact on your admission to IT.

The part in bold is a misunderstanding of the lottery algorithm. If someone else has a better lottery draw than you then they will beat you 10 times out of 10 for any school for which you both choose, assuming neither has a preference such as IB, sibling etc. You can rank IT #1 and they rank IT #12 and they will beat you, because of their luckier draw. You can still get into IT, if there is still a spot left for you after they and everyone else with better draw or better preference who chose IT as one of their 12 gets in, or they get into somewhere that they ranked higher, freeing up the spot for you.

If you don't understand this then you should indeed be hiring someone to walk you through this, but it should be me. Incredible how much lottery misinformation exists on DCUM.

Congrats though, heard IT is a great school and you sound happy there. That's the most important thing.

And you were right about not having any kind of shot at Brent OOB. Although ranking Brent #1 would not have affected any of your other 11 choices, it would have uselessly consumed a spot that you could have used for a safety school, at #12. Make sense? No? You can send me $500 in advance and I will explain it to you in person   :)

[/quote]

If I understand all of this correctly, the poster took the correct action -- removing Brent -- regardless of whether the reasoning was correct. In the end it didn't make a difference. But, had her lottery pick been higher, she might have been glad to have had that 12th slot rather than wasting one on Brent.

So, again if I am correct, EV's advice turned out to be good, if based on a wrong assumption.
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I think it's fair to assume that PP misunderstood EV's advice.  The advice would have been not to waste your pick on somewhere that you have less than zero chance of getting into, rather than not putting it #1 because it will impact your other choices.  PP still had an amazing amount of luck.[/quote]

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