Results from the 2023 NYC School Admission Lottery Surveys

Note to applicants for the 2024 admission cycle and beyond: these results are for the Fall 2023 HS entrance admission cycle. Odds of admissions vary year to year. The results on this page can give you an idea of historical patterns but are in no way a guarantee that the odds will be the same in the future. Results for later admission cycles can be found here: 2024.

This post reports the results of the crowdsourcing survey for the 2023 NYC HS Admission Lottery. To learn more about the lottery and see the results for the 2021 and 2022 admission cycle you can read the first three posts in the series:
Part 1. Decoding the NYC School Admission Lottery Numbers
Part 2. Gaining Insights from the NYC School Admission Lottery Numbers
Part 3. Results from the 2022 NYC School Admission Lottery Surveys
You can also read a more in-depth account of the study I presented at the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT’23): Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability through Crowdsourcing: A Study of the NYC School Admission Lottery, or watch the conference presentation.

The NYC DOE (now called the NYC Public Schools) has made significant improvements in the transparency of the process, implementing many of the changes I have been advocating for in my previous posts. In particular, families are now given their lottery number at application time, and the number of applicants reported on MySchools only shows the students who were considered by the school (i.e., who were not matched higher on their list) instead of all applicants who listed the school, and MySchools separates information about the number of applicants by priority groups. These changes have made the process easier to navigate for families, but information on the actual cutoffs at each school is still missing. Many families have told me how useful the results of past surveys were for helping them create their list of choices and managing their expectations; list strategizing is a frequent topic on the Applying to High School in NYC Facebook group. I hope that the DOE will continue its path toward better transparency and make this information available in the future, making the need for the crowdsourcing survey obsolete.

Survey Results: Methodology

The data was collected through Google surveys in the Spring of 2023. The data is self-reported by parents, and errors in data entry are possible; the following results should be interpreted with this in mind.

• As of May 4, 2023, there were 647 answers to the HS survey. I manually cleaned the data to remove obvious errors in data entry.
• The survey recorded students’ lottery numbers, as well as their groups, Ed. Opt. category and assessment/audition score (if applicable). I extracted the highest (worst) lottery number, along with the priority category (or score) of all students who received an offer to a school. To identify the lowest (best) lottery number declined, I only looked at schools that were ranked higher in the student’s choice list than the one they matched to, as the algorithm does not consider students for schools lower on their list than the one to which they match. More details on the process can be found in my previous posts.
• Survey answers are not representative of the whole applicant population: respondents are clustered in some geographical areas, skew higher income and higher achieving than the DOE student population. This does not impact the correctness of the cutoff information derived from the surveys but does impact the completeness of the information.
• Survey participants were asked whether they qualify for FRL (free and reduced lunch, the DOE measure of low-income status) diversity in admissions (DIA) set-asides, and whether their student had a student with disability (SWD) designation. About 9% of answers reported qualifying for FRL, and 11% for SWD. Parents have reached out to me to translate the survey and increase its reach to underrepresented populations. I hope to be able to gather more information on the odds of admissions for DIA and SWD students, to make these results helpful to more.

High School Admissions Results

I present the results by separating school programs into five different categories based on their admission methods. School admission methods were identified through the publicly available HS Directory, which contains 2021 data. As of the writing of this post, more recent data is not available; it is possible that some schools/programs that have changed their admission methods are not correctly identified. For ranked screened (essay-based) schools, I used the list available on the NYC DOE website.

Screened High Schools

For admission to screened schools in 2023, students were placed into 5 groups based on their final seventh-grade core course grades. Admissions to screened schools were done in group order, with ties broken by lottery number. Note that group 1 was much smaller than in 2022 when 63% of students qualified for the top group.

The following table shows, for each screened school, the highest Group and lottery number within that group that gained admission and the lowest (group, lottery number) that was denied admission. For instance, a Gen-Ed, non-DIA applicant in Group 1 with a lottery number starting with ‘17’ was admitted to 02M416: Eleanor Roosevelt HS, but a Group 1 applicant with a lottery number starting with ‘19’ did not get an offer. The school sets aside 50% of seats for low-income students (FRL), making the odds of admission for a DIA-eligible Gen-ed student higher but students still need to be in Group 1 and have a lottery number lower than ‘c8’ (possibly lower) to receive an offer.

The results are inconsistent for two schools: 22K535 : Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences : K76A : Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences and 24Q610 : Aviation Career & Technical Education High School. 22K535 : Leon M. Goldstein had a group 1 student with lottery ‘eb’ accepted, but another group 1 student with lottery ‘28’ not accepted. This school has geographic priorities, which the survey does not record, which can explain the discrepancy. 24Q610 : Aviation Career & Technical Education High School has two programs, it is possible that the conflicting results: a student in group 3 admitted with a lottery number starting with ‘1f’ while another group 3 student not admitted with a lottery number starting with ‘1b’, are due to the two students applying to different programs and that information being incorrectly reported in the survey.

Ranked Screened (Assessment-based) High Schools

Several schools used both assessments and grades. Students were ranked on a composite score based on their school-specific assessments (typically essays), and grades (based on a coarse mapping of their Group to a grade score). Details on the scoring weights for each school can be found on the DOE website. The composite score is out of 100.

As usual, ties are broken by lottery numbers. Results for these Ranked Screened schools are shown in the table below.

As was the case last year, some schools gave 100 to most students, while others used the whole grading scale.

• To gain admission to 03M479 : Beacon High School, students who did not qualify for a set-aside needed a perfect 100 assessment score AND a lottery number that started with ‘b’ or lower (the actual cutoff being between ‘9’ and ‘b’). DIA-eligible students could be admitted with a lower score, so the lottery number had less of an impact. Similar results are shown for 01M376 : NYC iSchool.
• 03M541 : Manhattan / Hunter Science High School seems to have once again assigned a maximum score of 100 to all essays. The composite score is composed of 70% course grade (using the coarse mapping of groups to grade) and 30% essay. Out of the 40+ entries in the survey for the school, all Group 1 students had a composite score of 100, Group 2 a score of 93, and Group 3 a score of 86. For non-DIA students, this resulted in a lottery process among all Group 1 students, with a number lower than ‘4’ needed for admission. There were not enough answers to determine a cutoff for DIA-eligible students.
• Both Bard High Schools: 01M696 : Bard High School Early College and 24Q299 : Bard High School Early College Queens provided fine-grained grading for their assessments, which means that students with bad lottery numbers had a chance at getting an offer if their assessment scores were high enough. For instance, students with a composite score greater than 88 (or somewhere between 87 and 70 if DIA-eligible) for 01M696 : Bard High School Early College were admitted regardless of their lottery numbers, students with scores of 88 needed a lottery number starting with a number lower than 7 or 8.

Audition High Schools

The audition school process is similar to that of the ranked screened schools above, except that the score is based solely on the audition and does not take into account the Group of the student.
Audition schools did use the whole scale to score students, making the lottery number far less important in the chances of admission.

Open Admission High Schools

These schools are purely lottery-based, all students regardless of grades are placed in the same lottery pool. Some schools have DIA set-asides or SWD seats; when available data for these is separated (Priority column).

Ed. Opt. High Schools

These schools place students into three pools: High, Middle, and Low, based on their academic performance. The results below show for each school the cutoffs for the three categories when the information is available.
The survey did not ask for the Ed. Opt. category until after 300 answers were recorded. For the first 300 answers, Ed. Opt. category was thus derived from the Group information: Groups 1 and 2 were mapped to High, Groups 3 and 4 to Middle, and Group 5 to Low.

Here as well, there are inconsistent results for two schools: 02M507 : Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology and 21K525 : Edward R. Murrow High School : K57A : Communication Arts, but, as in the case above, these two schools have geographic priorities that may explain the discrepancy.

ASD/ACES Programs

Here are the lottery numbers for students admitted to ASD/ACES programs. There is little information as to how students are ranked for these programs, I report on the lottery numbers that were accepted and rejected, and on the group if that information seems to have been taken into account in the ranking. I will refine these results if more information is made available.

D75 Programs

Here are the group and lottery numbers for students admitted to screened ASD/ACES programs. Here as well, it is not clear if schools use group information to screen students. I will update the results if more information becomes available.

List of High Schools where unmatched students were assigned

Finally, this is a list of schools to which unmatched students have reported being assigned.