There appears to be a lot less movement than last year. I've been trying to stay positive, but there is no disputing the facts. There are fewer people that we know of who have gotten in off the wait list this year than at this point last year and that's the case even with more people reporting their position on the wait list here on sdn. The observed trickle of wait list movement cannot be explained by statistical anomaly anymore.
Did someone say statistics?
I said we'd know more by this friday, so here's what we know:
I've done some calculations. I can't guarantee they're correct. The theories are sound (i think) but I might have messed something up in excel.
Again, assumes perfectly random distribution, etc.
Here's what I did:
Assume upper waitlist of 33.
calculated how far the waitlists have probably moved (using the deck of cards analogies, and the ways of constructing two decks, one accepted and one not yet accepted, given the accepted/still waiting data. There are some weighted averages thrown in there too.)
(for 2010, it's 21.5 spaces. For 2011, it's 10.6 spaces. )
Then I figured out the probabilities that the waitlists are offset, and found what the most likely offset was, and came up with
11.9 spaces behind.
Therefore it seems that the two years not not progressing similarly.
Major contributors to this result that have not been addressed are the disparities in the number of people reporting upper third on SDN-- 19 this year, only 12 last year (I'm assuming only the known acceptances were listed as upper third.) The data 'sampling' method is horrible has has introduces lots of errors that I don't know how to correct for.
So what does this mean? Nothing. There are really too many confounding variables and simply not enough data to positively say the waitlist is moving slower, but the magic 8-ball is saying all signs point to yes.
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