How does College Vine determine acceptance rates?

Answered

Actually, I personally feel that CV is the very best online predictor of acceptance rates out there for the masses. My dad has his own set of very complicated spreadsheets but the results are similar.

For example, I applied to a Top 3 Ivy which has a less than a 6% acceptance rate but CV said it was a hard target for me at 37-48% or about 42.5%, a little less than a coin toss. Well, I got in so that worked out in my favor and proved that if you understand the college admissions process and have enough data points you can create a model that is highly accurate and predictable. Retroactively, I just added 2 schools to my chancing profile USMA, USAF or West Point, and Colorado Springs. For WP I got it became a target at 67%-82% and for AF I got 85-92% like you did or a Safety School even though both colleges have an 11% acceptance rate. WP Class of 2024 was actually 10.0% 1210/12294 and AF was actually or 11.1% 1147/10354. You can verify real rates if you google search on the school's Common Data Set which will return a link to a very lengthy .PDF or .XLS file containing all the stats for each year going back more than 10 years. Had I applied to either, I feel very confident with CV's percentages that I would have been admitted to both and feel the chancing percentages are very accurate.

To explain what they mean think of a Scatter Plot of all the applicants for the college in one year, take for example West Point. There would be 12294 data points on a graph where the X-Axis would say TEST SCORES like ACT or SAT and the Y-Axis would be GRADES like UWGPA. Refer to this Class of 2024 profile for data point reference.

https://www.westpoint.edu/admissions/class-profile

Against just 2 criteria (keeping in mind there would be many other factors in college admissions) you will see that 71% of the Admits were in their Top Fifth of their school or top 20% so they were all B+ to A Students and had 3.5-4.0 GPAs and 25% of the Admits had Composite SAT score of 1400-1600 and then 41% had Composite SAT scores of 1200-1400.

If this were scatter plotted you would see a pattern that 3/4s of the dots would be high on the Y-Axis and 1/4 would be below. Also, you would see that in the uppermost right quadrant of there would be a dense clustering of Admits with 1400+ SATs followed by a less dense pattern of Admits with 1200-1400 SAT scores. What this tells you is that if you have a 3.9-4.0 GPA and 1400+ SATs you are going to be in that upper right corner and between 75% of the dots will be in a lower position. Therefore, you can tell that even though they accepted only 10%, your stats put you in a 67-82% position. There is a range because there are many other factors like APs, SAT IIs, Essays, ECs, Recommendation.

So the only way the USAF prediction is not accurate is if you have a B average, 1200-1300 SATs, and very few ECS and other test scores. Otherwise, my guess is that you are a very good student.