Why we built Shortlisted

The problem, and what we did about it.

The problem

Almost every college-chances tool out there assumes one thing: you're a US student with a 4.0-scale GPA. Type in a CBSE percentage, A-Level grades, or an IB score, and most of them either break, force a rough conversion that throws away real information, or just don't exist for your curriculum at all. If you're applying outside the US — or with a non-US curriculum to any country — you're mostly on your own, guessing.

Why I built it

I'm an IB student myself, and I lived this exact problem while building my own university list. Every "chances calculator" I tried wanted a US GPA I didn't have, and every forum thread was someone guessing about someone else's IB score. I spent months paranoid — not knowing which schools were realistic reaches, which were fair matches, and which I was wasting an application on — because there was no honest, curriculum-aware answer anywhere. That's a real problem for anyone applying outside the standard US track, and I built Shortlisted because I genuinely wanted to fix it for the next student going through the same thing, not just for myself.

What we built instead

Shortlisted was built to actually handle real curricula — CBSE, ICSE, State Board, A-Levels/AS-Levels and International A-Levels, IB Diploma, and US GPA — properly, not as an afterthought. It covers 970+ real universities across eight countries (US, UK, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Germany & France), and every match or acceptance estimate is grounded in named, citable sources: U.S. News & World Report, the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard, NIRF, The Complete University Guide, Times Higher Education, and QS World University Rankings — never a made-up number.

Who it's for

Mainly 11th and 12th graders trying to build a realistic shortlist — schools that are genuine reaches, solid matches, and safeties, based on their actual profile and actual data, not vibes. We also built in tools to track your target schools, understand your profile's strengths and gaps, and get a deep-dive analysis on any specific university you're considering.

What we're not

We're not a guarantee, and we say so directly when we don't have a real published number for a school rather than inventing one. Shortlisted is meant to replace guesswork with data — not replace your school counselor, and not promise an outcome no one can promise.