Chance Me estimates your admission odds at each school using a transparent formula built from official Common Data Set statistics — your academic profile and activities weighed exactly the way each school says it weighs them. No AI, no guesswork, and nothing you type here ever leaves your browser.
Activities, Awards, and Essay are self-rated on a 1–10 scale; Letters of Recommendation and Interview on a 1–5 scale. Each scale's examples (in that section, above) are calibrated against the profiles admitted to the selective schools we track, not a generic curve. Leaving a category unrated never counts against you — it's treated as neutral, not weak.
Each school gets an Academic Index (GPA percentile within that school's own reported GPA distribution, class-rank percentile against its reported rank bands if you set the Class Rank slider, SAT/ACT composite percentile against its 25th–75th range, and course rigor from your AP or IB load, average score, and weighted-GPA strength — dual-enrollment courses add to the course-count side of rigor even without a track selected) and a Holistic Index (your Activities, Awards, Essay, Letters-of-Recommendation, and Interview ratings). Class rank matters most at schools that weigh it heavily in their own CDS "Admission Factors" table — some schools lean on it more than GPA. Interview works the same way: its weight within the Holistic Index scales with how important that specific school says interviews are, from zero at schools that don't consider them up to on par with Letters of Recommendation at schools that call them "Very Important." If a school doesn't report a GPA distribution or test-score range at all, we fall back to a rough generic estimate rather than dropping that factor entirely — noted per-school below when it happens.
The two are blended using weights derived from that school's own Common Data Set "Admission Factors" table — a school that marks test scores "Very Important" and essays "Considered" leans more on your Academic Index; a school that rates both "Very Important" blends them evenly. Interview's importance rating now counts toward this school-level blend too, not just its own weight inside the Holistic Index.
That blended score is compared against a base acceptance rate using a logistic model to produce a probability, then mapped to one of seven tiers. The base rate uses that school's own reported Early Action/Early Decision or Regular Decision rate when available (about a third of tracked schools report this split); otherwise it falls back to the school's overall rate adjusted by a disclosed, generic industry-wide early-round boost. If you flagged a competitive major, that rate is further reduced by a disclosed generic multiplier — we don't have real per-major CDS data, so this isn't school-specific. We also apply a small upward calibration shift throughout: a Common Data Set distribution describes the admitted class, not the full applicant pool (which includes many unrealistic "reach" applications that drag the raw acceptance rate down) — so a profile that matches the admitted-class median is treated as better odds than the bare acceptance rate would suggest. That shift (and how much your profile strength moves the needle at all) is scaled down at the most selective schools — being meaningfully above the admitted median matters less, proportionally, when a school rejects the large majority of similarly excellent applicants anyway.
Small additive adjustments apply for: in-state residency at public schools (scaled by how much that school says it considers residency — different for every target school, so a CA school and an NY school are judged independently), legacy status (scaled by that school's "alumni relation" importance), first-generation status (scaled by that school's "first generation" importance), and international applicants who indicated they'll need financial aid, at schools that aren't need-blind for international students. We track need-blind-for-international status ourselves for a short, well-documented list of schools (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, and Dartmouth, among the schools we track) since the Common Data Set itself doesn't report this — everywhere else defaults to need-aware. International applicants who don't need aid, or who are applying to one of those need-blind schools, get no penalty.