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For Counselors: Guide to Acceptance Likelihood and Intelligent Match

Understanding how colleges fit each student’s profile is critical to effective college counseling. This article explains two essential tools that streamline this process:

  • Acceptance Likelihood: A system that classifies colleges by their competitiveness for individual students
  • Intelligent Match: A feature that automatically assigns Acceptance Likelihood values at scale, personalized to your students and high school, using their academic profiles.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how these tools work, their default settings, and how to customize them to best meet your needs.

What is Acceptance Likelihood?

Acceptance Likelihood is a value that can be assigned to colleges to show how selective they are for each student. It provides a clear and consistent way to evaluate how competitive each college is and serves as the foundation for assessing the balance of a student’s college list and generating their List Score.

We use these simple, customizable values to classify colleges:

  • Far Reach
  • Reach
  • Level
  • Likely
  • Very Likely

What is Intelligent Match?

Intelligent Match makes assigning Acceptance Likelihood values easier by doing it automatically for each student. It looks at a student’s academic profile and Predictive Chances, then matches colleges to the appropriate likelihood value—like Far Reach or Likely—based on the ranges set in your school’s settings.

Key Benefits:

✅ Personalized predictions: Reflects the unique profiles of your students and your school’s data.

✅ Automated efficiency: Saves time by assigning likelihood values at scale.

✅ Dynamic updates: Recalculates likelihoods automatically as student profiles evolve.

✅ Manual overrides: Allows counselors or students (if permitted) to make manual adjustments that override Intelligent Match.

✅ Scalable: Can be implemented schoolwide or for specific students.

Customizing Acceptance Likelihood settings

Before assigning Acceptance Likelihood ratings, ensure your school’s settings are tailored to meet your needs.

To access your settings:

  1. Log into your account.
  2. Go to More > School Settings from the left navigation menu.
  3. Scroll to the Acceptance Likelihood section to review and adjust options.

Let’s go over the Acceptance Likelihood settings available to you.

Adjusting visibility

By default, Acceptance Likelihood ratings are visible to students and parents once assigned.

Want to hide them until Balanced List Scores are shared?

  1. From your school settings, find the Acceptance Likelihood Visibility setting.
  1. Switch it to No.

What happens? Students and parents will see likelihood ratings only after Balanced List Scores are shared, and you control when that happens with this setting.

Customizing ranges and labels

Acceptance Likelihood ranges: Edit the default ranges for each likelihood value (e.g., 0–10% for Far Reach). These ranges define how Predictive Chances are translated to Acceptance Likelihood levels, ensuring they align with your school's criteria.

Intelligent Match uses these ranges to compare a student’s Overall Predictive Chances and assign the appropriate acceptance likelihood category.

Update labels: Swap out default terms (e.g., “Far Reach,” “Reach”) with terms that align with your school’s communication style.

Permission settings

By default, both counselors and students can assign Acceptance Likelihood values.

Want more control?

  1. From your school settings, find these settings:
    1. Allow counselors to assign Acceptance Likelihoods
    2. Allow students to assign Acceptance Likelihoods
  2. Set either or both options to No to restrict permissions.

💡 Here’s a quick summary of these settings, updates you can make, and the results:

Assigning Acceptance Likelihood

There are two ways to assign Acceptance Likelihood values:

  • Manually: Counselors or students (if permitted) select likelihood values for each college.
  • Automatically with Intelligent Match: Assign values based on Predictive Chances, either school-wide or for specific students or classes.

Manual assignment

  1. Navigate to the student’s My Colleges page (accessible from their profile or the roster).
  2. Click on a college tile to open the College Detail Panel. In the table view, hover over the college name and select Preview to open the panel.
  3. In the Admission Intelligence section, click the pencil icon next to Acceptance Likelihood.
  1. From the dialog box, select Set manually and choose a value from the list. You also have the option to use Intelligent Match for an automated assignment.
  1. If the student has permission to set values and has taken action, their name will appear next to the assigned value.

Using Intelligent Match

Intelligent Match automates the process of assigning Acceptance Likelihood values. You can choose between two implementation options:

  1. Go to More > School Settings, and scroll down to the Balanced Lists & Admission Intelligence section.
  2. Toggle Intelligent Match to On (off by default), and select a start month and year (default: August of Freshman year).
  3. Click Apply Changes to save your selections.

What happens? Likelihood values are automatically assigned for all students beginning from the selected month and year, and Balanced List Scores are generated accordingly.

B. Individual Intelligent Match

If your school isn’t ready to roll out Intelligent Match across the entire school, you can start with a more focused approach by enabling it for individual students:

  1. Go to the student’s My Colleges page.
  2. Click their List Score to open the List Score panel.
  1. Click Set Intelligent Match and select Use Intelligent Match.

What happens? Acceptance likelihood values will be automatically assigned for this student. Values will update dynamically for this student as their profile changes and their list score will update accordingly.

Did you know?
If your school sets Match Levels for a student, these will be used to assign Acceptance Likelihoods to colleges and generate college list scores, instead of relying on Intelligent Match.

Want to switch to Intelligent Match? You can enable Intelligent Match in your school settings to automate Acceptance Likelihood assignments.

Learn more about Match Levels here.

Sort and adjust likelihood values

  • Sort: Both you and your student can sort the list of colleges based on Acceptance Likelihood from the column and table view of My Colleges.
  • Adjust Values: If both the counselor and student have the ability to set values, either of you can select a different level, overriding the previous selection.

Manual selections override any values assigned by Intelligent Match.

Additional resources

Got questions? Visit our Scoir AI FAQ for answers to common questions.

Looking for tips? Explore our Scoir AI Playbook for helpful tips and best practices.

How did we do?

For Counselors: Using Predictive Chances

For Counselors: Set student outcomes and post-graduate plans

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