Counselor-O-Matic looks at you in two different ways.

Part I: Fuzzy Search
Most online college search engines are pointless because they take you too seriously.

The results you retrieve from other search engines are simply that: literal, rigid results. You plug in data and they spit data back at you.

When we ask you where you might want to go to college, we take your answers seriously, too. But we take it a step further, putting your answers in a context of how the search and application process really works. Far from literal, there are loads of deeper factors on your end and theirs. So when you tell us that you want a non-denominational school, we don't eliminate every school that happens to be affiliated with a religion. We simply give points to schools that are non-denominational, and take away points from those that aren't.

Counselor-O-Matic uses a point system to make its recommendations specific to you. We look at each of your preferences this way, giving points if it's a characteristic you "really want", taking points if it's a characteristic you "don't want", using fewer points for those you have less strong feelings about, and ignoring the ones you've told us don't matter.

In this way, we come up with a percentage rating for each college that corresponds to how well it fits your interests. Some of our results will surprise you. For instance, you might tell us you want a co-ed school, but we might recommend Wellesley as a 90% fit—even though all of its students are women—because it is otherwise a perfect fit (as long as you're a woman). Counselor-O-Matic likes to brainstorm with your answers and come up with a real-life host of options for you to consider.

So take those surprising answers as starting points to expand your list of potential colleges, and challenge your assumptions about what you want. As our answers surprised you, so might the schools themselves. Some schools have an official religious affiliation, for example, but enroll some of the least religious students in the US (see our list of schools where "students ignore God on a regular basis"). Other schools are small, but have affiliations with much larger schools that give them a relatively large breadth of offerings.

Of course, sometimes, this kind of fuzzy search will sometimes lead us to suggest some schools that are terrible fits. If that happens, let us know, and we'll continue to tweak our algorithms to make Counselor-O-Matic even better.

Part II: Selectivity
Once it knows which schools best fit your needs, Counselor-O-Matic tries to figure out where you might get in. To do this, it has to judge your academic and extracurricular activities in much the way that colleges will when they read your application. We'll be off a bit for folks with art, military, and other somewhat specialized experience or interests. But most schools are looking at the same factors:

• Your high school record. Are you taking tough courses and doing well in them? To compute your rating here, we start with your answers to our questions about "course load" (30% of your school rating), GPA (30%), and class rank (30%). Then we factor in your high school itself (a bit under 10%), because a good grade at a challenging school means more than a good grade elsewhere.
• Your standardized test scores. Almost as important as your high school record are your scores on the SAT or ACT. Buckle down and study hard. If your grades aren't quite up to snuff, a stellar test score could help.
• Your extracurriculars. We compute a rating here based on your answers to the questions on the "High School Life" page. Answering the top answer of the "extracurricular involvement" question instead of the second answer is the equivalent of scoring an extra 100 points on your SAT. Your recommendations and essays are not overly important by themselves, but as supporting evidence for your contention that your extracurricular involvement is real, meaningful, and supports who you are as a person and a potential student.

Some schools rely more heavily on test scores, some more on grades and course selection. At many large schools, academics are way more important than your after-school activities; at many selective and small schools, though, your extracurriculars are almost as important as your grades.

Most schools give you a score based on these three factors (your high school record is a bit less than half, your test scores about 20%, and extracurriculars the rest. On the basis of that score, they accept or reject the great majority of applicants; the ones in the middle are considered in much greater depth; for those students, something else (e.g. a great essay or recommendation, or being the only applicant from North Dakota) will make—or break—your chances of getting in.

However, admissions offices don't only use a formula—they're trying to build a class, in the way that a coach tries to build a team. They want great journalists for the newspaper and great athletes for the sports program. They want kids from all over the country and possibly the world. They want (if they're co-ed) a rough balance of men and women, and a certain degree of diversity. Finally, they want to be loyal to alumni who have supported them. Counselor-O-Matic tries to take all of these things into account in its questions about your parents and your background on the "You and Your Family" page. Your answers have a different impact on your chances at different schools, so we call those answers "wild cards."

What's enough to get you into one school won't necessarily get you into another. Go figure. To help break it down, on each school's profile page we've given the college a "Selectivity Index." We created that index by looking at the average scores and GPA of its incoming students, and the percentage of applicants that it accepts.

Based on your rating, as adjusted for the wild cards, we decide if each school is a safety, reach, or good match.

Counselor-O-Matic is one sweet tool. With both its fuzzy and selective search abilities, it tries to give you a well-rounded, highly individualistic list of schools.