number_cruncher

Continuing my look at the GradCafe stats. I thought i'd be interesting to see how the users of the site break down into countries ... Top 10 countries by visit to survey (past 12 months) United States 2,046,041China 273,236South Korea 148,360Canada 120,628Taiwan 87,214India 84,054Turkey 53,714United Kingdom 52,277Iran 34,320Hong Kong 32,155 Top 10 countries by visit to forum (past 12 months) United States 1,540,747Canada 128,443India 60,937United Kingdom 51,054China 36,436South Korea 21,744Singapore 17,950Germany 14,444Taiwan 14,341France 13,040 The numbers reported are the number of visits (as determined by Google analytics).

The averages are taken over all programmes. If there was a school with fewer than 20 data points we ignored it to get some kind of true average. We also only included GPAs reported that were below 4 (some schools use 5 and international countries use 10). I tried doing a report based on programmes too, but I thought the results too contentious to post.

I thought it'd be interesting to pull some stats out of last years data, just for curiosities' sake. Take all of this with a large shovel of salt since none of this is scientific. And it is all based on voluntary (probably inaccurate) reporting. But anyway ... "Top" 10 schools based on "Average Accepted GPA" Stanford University 3.84Princeton University 3.83University Of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) 3.80University Of Washington, Seattle 3.79University Of California, Berkeley (UCB) 3.78Cornell University 3.78New York University (NYU) 3.78Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) 3.76University Of Chicago 3.75Harvard University 3.74 "Toughest" 10 schools based on "Average Rejected GPA" University Of Michigan, Ann Arbor 3.78Harvard University 3.78Princeton University 3.78Brown University 3.78California Institute Of Technology (Caltech) 3.77Stanford University 3.77Yale University 3.75Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) 3.74University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC) 3.73Cornell University 3.733 "Most popular" 10 programmes in Fall 2010 based on number of acceptances and rejections Economics 4198Computer Science 2994Philosophy 2159English 2082Physics 1841Political Science 1744Mathematics 1294Sociology 1056History 813Statistics 659 Obviously all of this is heavily dependent on the number of users to the site and their particular interest. Seems like economists have nothing better to do than apply and post their data ;-).

the data I got only has school, program, GPA and GRE scores. Not sure if there's more in the full DB, but because you don't need to log in to post results I doubt there's any way of tracking individuals. I'll check with bgk.

not everyone is entering their GRE scores, so the list changes a bit Stanford University 3.873333 1422.2222 18Cornell University 3.855000 1416.0000 10University Of Chicago 3.816364 1434.5455 11Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) 3.814444 1384.4444 9University Of California, Berkeley (UCB) 3.812500 1417.5000 12Northwestern University 3.774444 1373.3333 9University Of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) 3.772500 1411.2500 8Harvard University 3.765556 1451.1111 9University Of Pennsylvania (UPenn) 3.756250 1431.2500 8University Of Minnesota, Twin Cities 3.700000 1441.2500 8

I've been poking around with the results data to see what kind of statistics can be generated from the available data. So far there's not much, bgk's estimate of 1/10 was a little optimistic. However, here's some data to get the controversy started. From all acceptance results with gpa data and schools with more than 5 acceptances, here's the average GPA of those accepted and number of data points used to compute the average: Stanford University 3.874211 19Cornell University 3.868182 11Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) 3.848182 11University Of California, Berkeley (UCB) 3.835000 14University Of Chicago 3.816364 11Northwestern University 3.795000 10California Institute Of Technology (Caltech) 3.773333 6University Of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) 3.768571 7Harvard University 3.765556 9University Of Pennsylvania (UPenn) 3.756250 8 Stanford most selective!??! Ahem!