TryKeith - Is It a Good College Acceptance Calculator for High School Students?

There is no more appropriate place to blog about my app, TryKeith.com, than here at Lumiere Education. The project was born, both very specifically and very surprisingly, from my preparation to speak to Lumiere’s parents and students. 

Before I ever spoke a word at Lumiere, I was a friend, then a client, then a referrer. I found every penny I spent on the program worth it many times over, and then witnessed my own advisees experience the same. So, I was overjoyed to be asked to give a talk on how social media was affecting college applicants.

I already knew the answer was, in general, ‘badly.’ I had seen, in the previous two years, students struggle in brand new ways to understand the priority of admissions offices in ways they never had before. I witnessed many frightening things (even some attempting to tattle on classmates who cheated!), but perhaps none scarier than students who suddenly believed that they, despite their recommendations, grades and scores, could narrate their case for admissions with essays alone.

So, choosing the platform where I was least likely to be punished for being unc, I created a Reddit account, u/keithberman, flying in the face of the internet-warrior anonymity that defines the medium. Instead of “bro chud lowkey cooked,” I wrote longhand responses with citations and correct information. I got a lot of thank-you notes privately, but not much in the way of karma or upvotes.

Still, someone noticed my efforts, and I ended up being asked to mod r/CollegeAppsAdvice in a couple of weeks on the platform. It soon became clear that, beyond the tropes of ‘misinformation,’ applicants were making three mistakes:

A) They had no idea where they stood in the highly selective college admissions process. Students were either playing it far too safe, or way too aggressive, and there were few in-between. Built into this were “profiles” that included data that had marginal, or no, relevance to a real admissions decision.

B) They were choosing insane topics for their essays. Most commonly, they were picking something that was likely to hurt their chances. Instead of picking a topic that would help them get in, the entire point of a college essay, they were “trauma dumping” about something that happened long before they applied, giving admissions officers the exact reason to reject them.

C) They had no way of evaluating how good their essays were. Generally, the fastest opinion was the one students were using. For the vast majority of Reddit users, the extent of the feedback they get is from other high school students, not educated adults, and the results showed.

So, with some speed, I built v1.0 of TryKeith.com – everything from picking the domain to getting the app up and running happened in that first month, and I worked all by my lonesome, building just for desktop. I calibrated 21 years of cases to the metrics and evaluations. Those students on my subreddit and many others were happy to give it a try, and the feedback I got from them in beta moved it along to what it is now. By the time I spoke at Lumiere, it was in v4 and good enough to put my name on.

Now, TryKeith.com is on v8. It exists in three versions: a lightweight version that only computes Competition Index that is embeddable into websites like Lumiere’s; a mobile-version that isn’t graphic heavy, and; the original version, improved countless times since its release. It hit 10,000 views this week, albeit I wasn’t even tracking for the first three versions.

The app can do some things very well. Here’s an honest review:

What the App Does Well

For a ‘traditional’ applicant, someone graduating from high school in their teens from a brick-and-mortar high school having taken college preparatory courses, the app will give you an excellent idea of where you stand relative to your competition on a clear scale of out 522-points, and give you a report as to what to do about it. If you took the honors/AP/IB courses, you will have a clear idea of a starting point.

For those same students, if you pay the fee to get your essay evaluated, you will actually know whether you wrote an essay worth submitting. Pointedly, you will avoid the five essay traps I discussed to the roughly 200 registrants at Lumiere, which was happily recorded and transcribed here (skip to 35:15 for the parts about essays). You will likely get your first and only real idea of how good your essay is relative to other elite applicants. Unfortunately, the standard that prevails on Reddit is ‘how do you compare to an average high school student,’ not ‘how do you compare to other T20 applicants,’ as of course nothing about Reddit requires a user to fill out qualifications before responding. It is ‘popular’ to get rejected by these schools, as most do, so the common notions will lead you down that path – the app gets you off it. 

In other words, for free, you will know whether you should apply. For $49, you will get the advice you need to avoid the pitfalls that I witnessed every day on Reddit.

What the App Does NOT Do Well

The TryKeith.com will take into consideration your research, your athletics, your activities, your leadership, your grades, your scores, your context (high school, ZIP code), and the rigor of your academic program. It only takes a minute to enter this stuff and it will give you a better assessment than anything on r/chanceme, by a significant margin.

What it will not do is just as clear.

A) Take into account if you are a first-generation, low-income student. While it will consider how well-represented your geography is, it will not ask you anything about your income or parents’ education. These factors are used in some outlying cases – but almost always used in the context of the geography and personal background of the applications, and virtually never used the same way twice – and there is no reliable, let alone objective, way to factor these in – that would require a real person who knows admissions.

B) The app will not rewrite your essay. Generically-trained AI does this by default – and you can try entering in an AI written essay to see how it does (I used dozens of AI-written essays to test the calibration, and none got even a 5.0/10 on the evaluation). You will get feedback and have to be proactive about incorporating it.

C) If you have significant standing in the professional music, art or sports world, such that you are being recruited, it has limited ways to measure this. I recommend strongly that you get an actual pro to write a letter on your behalf, both to your school counselor and admissions officer, via the appropriate portal submission process if this is the case.

What is Next

The next step forward for the app, which is AI-powered, is for it to talk to you. As this started as just something that came out of the compunction to help some suffering Redditors, and I made it all by my lonesome, I didn’t start thinking this is where it would go. However, I now am working on the Talk-to-Keith feature, where you can not only submit your essay, but also go back-and-forth with the evaluator, so that you can eventually get your score up. It will also discuss with you how to improve your Competition Index. I imagine this will roll out next year.

I feel compelled to end with a ‘thank you’ to the wonderful Lumiere Education, and the Redditors who gave me such lucid and thoughtful feedback. I didn’t necessarily expect much when I joined an online community to prepare for the talk I gave, but instead, it got me up-to-date both with the students I work with and the technology that surrounds them, not just how people talk with each other about college admissions online. For that, I am very grateful.

Keith Berman, Ed.M., M.S.Ed., CEP, is the President of Options for College and the creator of TryKeith.com. His admissions experience includes working for the Yale and Harvard Undergraduate Admissions Offices. He also created Johns Hopkins University's CTY College Prep course. His degrees are from Yale, Harvard and Bank Street College of Education.

Keith has consulted with the American Museum of Natural History, NYC Department of Education, Rochester City Public Schools, The Princeton Review India and many others. He was the Director of College Guidance at the Rudolf Steiner School and Yeshiva University High School for Boys.

Keith has led admissions programs at Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Wesleyan, Cal, Emory, NYU, Merrill Lynch, Nomura, Ernst & Young, Schwab and many more. ​He is frequently quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Daily News, US News & World Report, and has appeared on MSNBC, PBS, CNN, Fox Business and beyond. His main professional aspiration is to replace the anxiety of the college admissions process with hope and freedom for our amazing high school students.