Methodology

University data

Entry requirements and tuition ranges are compiled from publicly available university and programme pages for a fixed set of UK and Canadian universities. Requirements and fees change every admissions cycle, so every result links back to confirming against the official programme page before you rely on it — we don't treat our database as a replacement for the university's own published requirements.

How Reach / Match / Safety is calculated

This is a rule-based calculation, not an AI prediction. Given your destination, major, GPA, IELTS score, and budget, we first filter to universities that:

• Offer your selected major in your selected country
• Have a published minimum IELTS overall and band score at or below yours
• Have a minimum tuition at or below your stated annual budget

Within that eligible set, each school is placed into Reach, Match, or Safety based on how much headroom your GPA has above that school's published minimum GPA — the closer you are to the minimum, the more competitive (Reach) the tier; the more headroom you have, the safer the tier. This means the same university can appear in a different tier for two different applicants, which is intentional: tiering is about your fit against a school, not a fixed ranking of the school itself.

What's not included

The calculation only uses the four inputs above. It does not, and currently cannot, account for: essay/SOP quality, references, extracurriculars or portfolio, programme-specific prerequisites beyond a general major match, how competitive the applicant pool is that year, or nationality/fee-status-specific quotas. Because of this, a Reach/Match/Safety result is a planning aid, not a prediction of admission — treat it as a starting point for research, not a guarantee.

How SOP review scoring works

Your draft is scored across five sections — opening hook, academic background, career goals, why this university, and closing — by an AI model (Claude, accessed via DataEyesAI) prompted to give sentence-level, specific feedback rather than generic praise. The AI is also asked to flag common red flags admissions officers watch for, such as generic or plagiarism-sounding phrasing and unexplained gaps. This is AI-generated feedback on your own writing, not a rewrite — the tool is designed to help you strengthen your own draft, not to write the SOP for you.

How the visa question bank was built

The UK and Canada question banks are organised around the themes each country's process is publicly known to probe — for the UK, course/university choice and funding/sponsorship history; for Canada, the study permit's GIC/DLI structure and genuine-student intent. These questions are based on publicly documented visa requirements and commonly reported interview themes, not an official or leaked question bank from either government. The AI follow-up during practice responds specifically to what you wrote, in the style of a real officer, and highlights wording that may come across as vague, inconsistent, or memorized — it is not a prediction of your actual visa outcome.

Questions

If anything above doesn't match what you see in the product, or you think a specific university's data is out of date, please get in touch.