How PrepToDone scores your profile

What we evaluate.

The scoring engine runs on your own inputs across four parts of an application:

• Academic record — your GPA, read on the US 4.0 scale.
• Standardized testing — your SAT or ACT score. When you provide both, the engine uses whichever places you higher against a given school.
• Activities — your extracurricular involvement.
• Awards — your honors and recognitions.

These come from you. We do not infer them, and we do not scrape them from third-party reviews or rankings.

The data we compare you against.

Each school's admissions figures — acceptance rate, admitted-student SAT and ACT 25th and 75th percentiles, and admitted GPA — come from official, public sources:

• IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) — federal data from the U.S. Department of Education.
• College Scorecard — federal data from the U.S. Department of Education.
• Common Data Set — the standardized survey universities publish about themselves. This is the colleges' own reporting, so we never label it federal.

We cite the source for every school-level number. IPEDS and College Scorecard are attributed as federal; the Common Data Set is attributed to the colleges directly.

How we report your standing.

For each school, PrepToDone places your test score within that school's admitted-student 25th-to-75th percentile range and classifies the school as a reach, match, or safety. You see where you sit in the admitted band — the same published range universities report each year — not a single manufactured number.

The reach / match / safety call is a structural read of your position against official data. It describes where your profile lands today, and pairs with a gap analysis that shows what to strengthen.

Coverage and freshness.

PrepToDone covers 609 US colleges. Of those, 395 publish both a 25th and 75th percentile SAT range for admitted students — those are the schools your score is placed against. The two numbers differ because a school can be in our directory without publishing an admitted-score band, and where a school does not publish one we say so rather than estimating it.

Acceptance rates and admitted-score ranges come from the most recent published release for each school: IPEDS and College Scorecard on the federal side, and each college's own Common Data Set where it is available. Coverage is not uniform — schools publish on different schedules, and a figure that is current for one school may be a year older for another. Every school-level number on this site carries the year it came from.

We refresh against new federal releases as they are published, and against each college's Common Data Set when it appears, typically in the fall.

How the classification is computed.

There is no weighting, no model, and no learned parameters. The placement is arithmetic:

• If your score sits at or above a school's published 75th percentile, you are at or above the admitted range.
• If it falls between the 25th and 75th percentile, you are inside the admitted range.
• If it falls below the 25th percentile, the school is a reach on test score.

That is the whole calculation. It is deterministic and reproducible: with the same inputs and the same published band it returns the same answer every time, and you can check it yourself against the school's own published figures.

What this data cannot tell you.

Published ranges describe students who were admitted. They do not describe how admission decisions were made, and a range cannot be read backwards into odds.

• Test-optional distortion. When a school does not require test scores, only the students who chose to submit appear in its published band. Those students typically have stronger scores, so the range often reads higher than the full admitted class.
• Nothing about the rest of your application. Essays, recommendations, demonstrated interest, institutional priorities, and recruited-athlete or legacy status move real decisions and appear in no public dataset.
• A year of lag. Published figures describe a cycle that has already closed. The class you are applying to has not been admitted yet.

We report position against published data because that is what public data can honestly support. Anything beyond it would be a guess wearing a number.

What we deliberately do not do.

We do not predict admission. PrepToDone never reports a percentage figure for being admitted or rejected, because no honest tool can promise an outcome. We report position against admitted-student data, and the disciplined next steps that follow from it. The promise is preparedness, not a guarantee.