Gameplay Guide

How IvyGuessr Works

A complete walkthrough of the game — from choosing a school to interpreting the results and developing real admissions intuition.

Step by Step

The gameplay loop

Choose a School

IvyGuessr features a curated selection of elite universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown. Each school has its own pool of applicant profiles compiled from real, publicly shared admissions results. Select the school whose admissions culture you'd like to test yourself against.

Read Two Applicant Profiles

Each round presents two fully detailed profiles side by side. These aren't invented — they reflect real applicants who publicly shared their results. Every field you'd expect an admissions officer to consider is present: academic performance, standardized test scores, extracurricular depth, essay quality ratings, awards, class rank, income bracket, and detailed notes on strengths and weaknesses.

Take as much time as you need. There is no countdown. The goal is genuine engagement with the material — not a reflex test.

Pick the Accepted Applicant

Each pairing is designed so that one applicant was accepted and the other was rejected or waitlisted. Click the card you believe represents the accepted student, or press the button at the bottom of that card. Your selection is locked in immediately — no second-guessing allowed, just like a real admissions committee.

Review the Outcome

After you guess, both cards are revealed with their actual outcomes. The accepted applicant's card turns green; the rejected or waitlisted applicant fades back. A review bar appears below with a plain-language explanation of what made the difference — specifically what the accepted student had that distinguished them, and where the other applicant fell short by this school's particular standards.

✓ Accepted

✕ Rejected

~ Waitlisted

Track Your Score and Continue

Your running score is displayed after each round. Press "Next Round" to continue through the school's full set of matchups. At the end, you'll see a final summary showing your total correct picks and a breakdown of your performance. You can replay the same school with freshly shuffled pairings, switch schools, or return to the main site.

The Profile Fields

What you'll see on each card

Every applicant card shows the same standardized set of fields. Understanding what each one represents — and how admissions officers actually interpret it — is part of what makes IvyGuessr genuinely educational rather than just a trivia game.

Unweighted GPA

The applicant's grade point average on a 4.0 scale, excluding any AP or honors weighting. Context matters — a 3.9 from a highly rigorous school may carry more weight than a 4.0 from a less demanding one.

SAT / ACT Score

Standardized test scores where provided. Many elite applicants submit both; some submit neither under test-optional policies. Admissions officers typically look at these in context rather than as thresholds.

SAT Subject Tests

Scores on specific SAT II subject tests, now discontinued. Legacy profiles from before 2021 may include these as supplementary academic signals.

AP Courses & Scores

The number of Advanced Placement courses taken and the scores earned. Rigor of course selection is often weighted heavily — but accumulating APs without depth or interest can sometimes backfire.

Awards & Honors

Notable academic competitions, national programs, and recognition. Distinctions like Regeneron STS, USAMO, Davidson Fellow, or Intel ISEF carry significant weight at the most selective schools.

Extracurriculars

Activities pursued outside the classroom. Elite admissions tends to value depth over breadth — one transformative commitment is often more compelling than ten resume-building clubs.

Work / Volunteer Experience

Part-time jobs, internships, and sustained community service. Work experience — especially out of financial necessity — is often viewed favorably as evidence of responsibility and real-world engagement.

Essay Rating

An observer's qualitative rating of the applicant's essay quality, scored out of 10. This is often the most decisive factor separating similar candidates — and the field most impossible to fake.

Income Bracket

The applicant's reported household income. Many selective universities actively recruit first-generation and low-income students, and financial context can influence how academic credentials are interpreted.

Strengths & Weaknesses

A plain-language assessment of the applicant's profile — what genuinely distinguished them and where they fell short by the standards of that specific school. Often the most revealing part of the card.

Tips for Playing

How to get the most out of IvyGuessr

Most first-time players rely too heavily on test scores and GPA. Within a few rounds, they discover that these metrics are nearly identical across both applicants in many matchups — because they're prerequisites for the applicant pool, not differentiators within it. The real work is reading the subtler signals: essay quality, the depth and originality of extracurricular commitments, and whether the profile has a coherent narrative.

Pay close attention to the essay ratings. A 10/10 essay at Brown often features a completely original voice and specific engagement with that school's open curriculum ethos. A 6/10 at Harvard typically signals that the essay described achievements rather than revealing a person. Essay quality is the single most predictive field in the game — and the one most easily overlooked.

Also notice what each school is specifically looking for. Harvard's admits often have at least one extraordinary, hard-to-categorize accomplishment. MIT tends to reward builders and makers. Brown admits students who seem excited by intellectual freedom and non-traditional paths. Yale places enormous weight on both intellectual rigor and a genuine humanities dimension. These differences are consistent across rounds, and recognizing them is where the real learning happens.

The most common mistake players make

Choosing the applicant with the higher SAT score. In most rounds, both applicants are within 50 points of each other — well within the margin of noise. If you're defaulting to test scores as your tiebreaker, you'll lose more often than you win. The winning move is almost always to look at essay quality and the depth of the most distinctive extracurricular activity.

Start Playing →