Ah, the college selection process. A time filled with confusion, disappointment, and occasional bouts of joy, along with a nice dose of raging hormones. AcceptEdge, a new startup launching today, is looking to help take a little bit of uncertainty out of the process.
The site starts off by asking you a series of questions about your academic, family, and personal histories. Most of the data entered is pretty run of the mill — things like GPA, SAT scores, and whether you’d prefer a public or private school. But the site also takes into account things like the your interests outside of school, the books you enjoy, and music you like (you can connect your account with Facebook Connect if you’d like to save some typing).
After all of this, it spits out an ‘Edge Score’ that tells you just how competitive you are with your peers (I imagine these will be the source of much angst for students on the site) and a selection of your top college matches, with a percentage indicating just how closely they fit. There’s also some extensive data on each school’s admissions history, with information on the most predictive indicators for admission and plots of GPA vs standardized test scores.
All in all the site is off to a solid start, though it’s worth noting that there are plenty of sites that offer similar college ‘predictors’ that can analyze your test scores. Rather than rely on the site for its ‘Edge Score’, I think it could be more useful for helping students discover good colleges that they may not have heard of.
Other players in this space include CampusBuddy (which is more focused on college communities than test scores), and a host of college review sites like College Confidential and The Princeton Review.
