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- Nov 2, 2004
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Last year I made a spreadsheet that helped me organize my thoughts when I was deciding between some schools.
I've adapted it to help those of you that might still be deciding which offers to decline and those of you that might be getting off of waitlists in the coming weeks.
Here is how you use the sheet and interpret the results:
First. Take the criteria and put them in the order most important to you. Add any that you need.
Then give the schools subjective grades. If one school did particularly well in that area, give the school positive number, if the school did particularly poorly give it a negative number. For me, the rankings are a bit relative in that I had been to both schools prior to filling out the form, and if both were exactly tied, I gave both 0's. However, if both did well in an area, I would give both positive numbers, b/c a good performance in one area could outweigh a poor performance in another (e.x. all had good medical mission opportunities but School A got a better score, b/c I liked their's better and that point for Schools B and C could counteract something that I didn't like another area). The color coding was an after thought to make everything a little easier to understand.
Once you have the values totaled, use the sum function to total your raw score.
Now the spreadsheet should automatically calculate an adjusted score in the adjusted columns. This score is weighted by the value of the importance of each criteria (so curriculum is more important than gym and gets more weight in the adjusted score). The adjusted score will then be the one you want to look at if you are using this spreadsheet.
The multiplication factor is not entirely arbitrary, but it's not totally scientific.
the formula is y=1/(.25x)
This gives you a decreasing multiplier that looks something like this:
I played with the values and this seemed to give a good decreasing scale across ~20 criteria. It gives good strong points to the most important criteria by heavilly weighting them and then levels off at the later criteria.
If you're making major changes, you'll want to check to be sure that you haven't thrown off any of the calculations. If you don't have any experience with Excel, you might want to get some help with this.
Anyway, a lot of this was just gut reaction when assessing certain aspects of the schools. Go with what you think works... let me know if you have specific questions. Good luck.
Disclaimer: This is just a tool to help you make decisions. I pretty much found that the spreasheet just confirmed what I was thinking all along. If you disagree with what the spreadsheet says or wishing the results came out different, that's probably you making your decision right there.
Here is the spreadsheet and an example spreadsheet on how you might apply it:
I've adapted it to help those of you that might still be deciding which offers to decline and those of you that might be getting off of waitlists in the coming weeks.
Here is how you use the sheet and interpret the results:
First. Take the criteria and put them in the order most important to you. Add any that you need.
Then give the schools subjective grades. If one school did particularly well in that area, give the school positive number, if the school did particularly poorly give it a negative number. For me, the rankings are a bit relative in that I had been to both schools prior to filling out the form, and if both were exactly tied, I gave both 0's. However, if both did well in an area, I would give both positive numbers, b/c a good performance in one area could outweigh a poor performance in another (e.x. all had good medical mission opportunities but School A got a better score, b/c I liked their's better and that point for Schools B and C could counteract something that I didn't like another area). The color coding was an after thought to make everything a little easier to understand.
Once you have the values totaled, use the sum function to total your raw score.
Now the spreadsheet should automatically calculate an adjusted score in the adjusted columns. This score is weighted by the value of the importance of each criteria (so curriculum is more important than gym and gets more weight in the adjusted score). The adjusted score will then be the one you want to look at if you are using this spreadsheet.
The multiplication factor is not entirely arbitrary, but it's not totally scientific.
the formula is y=1/(.25x)
This gives you a decreasing multiplier that looks something like this:
I played with the values and this seemed to give a good decreasing scale across ~20 criteria. It gives good strong points to the most important criteria by heavilly weighting them and then levels off at the later criteria.
If you're making major changes, you'll want to check to be sure that you haven't thrown off any of the calculations. If you don't have any experience with Excel, you might want to get some help with this.
Anyway, a lot of this was just gut reaction when assessing certain aspects of the schools. Go with what you think works... let me know if you have specific questions. Good luck.
Disclaimer: This is just a tool to help you make decisions. I pretty much found that the spreasheet just confirmed what I was thinking all along. If you disagree with what the spreadsheet says or wishing the results came out different, that's probably you making your decision right there.
Here is the spreadsheet and an example spreadsheet on how you might apply it:
Very helpful, thanks! 
