What are my chances?
What are my chances? This is the most commonly asked question in the Business Week Forum. What if in my consulting interview I got asked the same question - What were your chances to get admitted to a business school program? Where were you in the entire applicant pool – were you a top 10% or a top 20%? How do I determine that?
Interesting question, isn’t it? It would be just fun to deduce your probabilities and where you stand in the applicant pool. So, I was kind of mulling over this question and I kind of came up with a model of prediction from a purely statistical point of view.
John is applying to 5 schools – A, B, C, D and E. Here are the acceptance rates for each of the schools: A – 10%, B – 10%, C- 20%, D-20% and E-30%.
The chance of getting accepted in any one of the schools, using the law of probabilities is – 0.1*0.9*0.8*0.8*0.7*2 + 0.9*0.9*0.2*0.8*0.7*2 + 0.9*0.9*0.8*0.8*0.3 = 41.76%
Similarly, you can deduce all the other possibilities – getting admitted to 2 schools, 3 schools etc. Now comes the interesting part, for example if the probability to get admitted to any three schools is 8% and you get admitted to 3 schools – then you can obviously say that you are among the top 8% of the applicant pool applying to all these 5 schools. Assuming that the applicant pool to these 5 schools is a fair approximation of the entire applicant pool – you can confidently say that you are among the top 8% of the applicant pool.
To all those curious souls, here is an interesting way to determine where you stand…
Interesting question, isn’t it? It would be just fun to deduce your probabilities and where you stand in the applicant pool. So, I was kind of mulling over this question and I kind of came up with a model of prediction from a purely statistical point of view.
John is applying to 5 schools – A, B, C, D and E. Here are the acceptance rates for each of the schools: A – 10%, B – 10%, C- 20%, D-20% and E-30%.
The chance of getting accepted in any one of the schools, using the law of probabilities is – 0.1*0.9*0.8*0.8*0.7*2 + 0.9*0.9*0.2*0.8*0.7*2 + 0.9*0.9*0.8*0.8*0.3 = 41.76%
Similarly, you can deduce all the other possibilities – getting admitted to 2 schools, 3 schools etc. Now comes the interesting part, for example if the probability to get admitted to any three schools is 8% and you get admitted to 3 schools – then you can obviously say that you are among the top 8% of the applicant pool applying to all these 5 schools. Assuming that the applicant pool to these 5 schools is a fair approximation of the entire applicant pool – you can confidently say that you are among the top 8% of the applicant pool.
To all those curious souls, here is an interesting way to determine where you stand…
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