Show HN: College List Maker | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: College List Maker

clm-collegelistmaker.rhcloud.com

1 pointBlackJack8 comments

Hi, creator here. I made this app using Express + Mongoose and the great Hackathon Starter framework (https://github.com/sahat/hackathon-starter), all hosted on OpenShift. I basically got a lot of college data from the IPEDS database and made a form so users can submit their SAT score and figure out which schools to apply to. Safety schools are those that you have a great shot of getting into, Match schools are those where you fit the median profile, and Reach schools are that you have a lower chance of getting into.

I thought it'd be useful for kids who want to explore schools to apply to for college. The app is very barebones, but I had a lot of fun dipping my toes in web dev and learning some new technologies. If people like it I'll work on adding more features like entering your zip code/GPA to get a much better admissions profile. Admission at most colleges is based on your transcript and scores, and most kids stay in-state, so both of those would be pretty useful data points.

I'd love any feedback!

Refreshing the page not working, "cant get /results".

Tabbing doesn't work so I have to click on every text box to type.

You need to increase the number of colleges on the first page itself.

Keep working on this(potential of being helpful to many) and add more criteria as you mentioned.

Hey thanks for the feedback. For refresh, can you tell me what browser/device you're using? Refresh and tabs both work for me on Chrome on OSX, but I didn't test anything else :(

I currently use 2-4-2 for colleges, but it's arbitrary. I'm playing around with a 3 column UI with 5-6 colleges in each section. I didn't want to overwhelm the user but it seems like 8 total is too small.

I was using Firefox on OSx at the time I checked. I did another check on Opera and refresh isnt working and displaying same error. Now I can move between textboxes using tab.

I think you did a good job! Nice start! As you're saying, adding more criteria would make it better.

I entered "800" for all 3 scores and only got a few schools. Are you limiting the results?

For 2400 there are no Reaches since you'd be in the top for every school. There's an issue with the random selector so schools get duplicated sometimes, so I'll fix that.

Update: For the matches there's only six results in total which is why the output is so little. If you've got a perfect score, pretty much everything is a safety ;)

Yeah, if you have a perfect SAT score, I'm sure you're not hunting around for schools. :)

I'm just saying there are a lot of schools out there. If I used your site to find schools, I'd like to see all available options.

I currently display 2 safeties, 4 matches, and 2 reaches. I wanted people to refresh to see other results, but I could think of giving other options to show more results. I just didn't want to dump tens or hundreds of schools at a time.

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