Table of Contents

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.

Acceptance Likelihood Permissions

  • Display Acceptance Likelihoods to students & parents
    Choose Yes (default) to make acceptance likelihood values visible to students and parents, or No to hide them.
  • Allow counselors to assign acceptance likelihood

Choose Yes (default) to let counselors set acceptance likelihood values for colleges, or No to prevent them from doing so.

  • Allow students to assign acceptance likelihood (when visible)

Choose Yes (default) to let students assign their own acceptance likelihood values when this feature is visible to them, or No to disable it.

Customizing Accepatance Likelihood Ranges

Set how Predictive Chances map to each acceptance likelihood category. Click Edit to use the sliders to adjust the percentage ranges for each category. Click Reset to Default to revert changes, or Apply Changes to save your updates.

Note: Changes may affect existing Balanced List scores.

Customizing Accepatance Likelihood Labels

Set the display labels for each acceptance likelihood category. Default labels are provided, but you can click Customize Labels to edit them and match your school’s terminology or preferences.

💡 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 automatically assigns acceptance likelihood values to colleges using Predictive Chances. You can choose between two implementation options:

  1. Go to More > School Settings, and scroll down to the Admission Intelligence section and find the Intelligent Match setting
  2. Use the Starting dropdown to choose the month, and the Of Class Year dropdown to choose the class year. For example, selecting August and Freshman year means Intelligent Match will begin assigning likelihoods at the start of freshman year.

    The Starting dropdown defaults to Never, which disables automatic assignments.
  1. 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: A guide to Predictive Chances with Scoir AI

For Counselors: Set student outcomes and post-graduate plans

Contact