What it does
StudentELO is an interactive platform where student's college application profiles are ranked. We identified the problem that students do not have access to an accurate rating of their college application resume; they do not know how they are placed among peers, thus don't know if it is good enough. Below is a brief description of how the website's logic works:
- We implemented the chess elo system in the ranking.
- Each student has a profile that starts with 1000 ELO. The profile is anonymous.
- Every user can be an admissions officer; we randomly provide them two profiles without showing the profile's current ELO
- The user decides which profile is better
- Based on the user’s decision, the ELO of two profiles is changed: the sum of the changes in ELO is always 0 The larger the original difference in ELO, the less the higher the ELO profile will game if won and the more the profile will lose if lost.
- The leaderboard is public, so students can compare themselves with other profiles, knowing their current placement and how to improve.
- To prevent purposefully wrong decisions, each user will have a rater accuracy percentage, which will be a final multiplier of the change in elo their decision will contribute.
Inspiration
We were inspired by the following sites: r/chanceme link It is a subreddit where people post their profiles, seeking for other users to comment on them. Even the subreddit identified an important problem, but due to the limitations of the ecosystem it existed in, the problem was not fully tackled. Speedrun.com link We believe a ranking system would tackle the problem better than r/chanceme did. However, students’ profiles could not be objectively summarized into a number (the time of the run in speedrun.com’s case.) We need to find a better-fitting metric system. chess.com link To rank chess players, a metric called the ELO system was implemented. ELO is a single number that represents the strength of the player. The ELO value may be changed after games are played. The winner will gain the same amount of ELO as the loser lost. A higher ELO player winning a lower ELO player will result in a small change in ELO. However, if the underdog wins, they will receive a larger boost in ELO. Draws usually result in a small increase in the lower-ranking player’s ELO. The ELO system is also characterized as zero-sum. Therefore, there is a very low chance for any kind of inflation to happen. We believe the ELO system perfectly suits our purpose.
How we built it
1. Prototype We use Canva to prototype. We figured out the layout and visual design. 2. Data organization We used Excel to create and manage the database of student profiles. 3.Web Dev We used the React platform to build the project.
Challenges we ran into
1. Time management. We spent a significant amount of time arguing over visual design at the very start, which is an inefficient way of working and caused us to run into a time shortage towards the end. Developers had to rush to finish. We were planning to implement the Kalman filter in the rating system to smooth out the outliers (obviously wrong decisions). However, due to the shortage of time, it did not become a feature. 2. Anti-malicious user mechanism Allowing anyone to contribute to the ranking has a significant issue: people could purposefully make the obvious wrong decision, therefore skewing the ranking and ELO of individual profiles. We tackle this problem with the implementation of rater accuracy. Rater accuracy is a decimal in the range [0,1) which acts as a final multiplier on the change in ELO after a rater has made the decision. The rater's accuracy allows us to minimize inaccurate raters’ influence over the overall ranking and thereby emphasize the accurate raters.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We finished the project within 8 hours. Although many obstacles were faced, in the end, studentELO was successfully finished. We tackled the ELO system and tuned it well. We provided a unique and novel solution to a long-existing and significant problem.
What we learned
the importance of teamwork and a decision-making leader. Plan out the time before starting hackathon A tiny improvement in a single detail does not matter. You just have to make the decision. You need more than one web dev dude. ;(
What's next for StudentELO?
Refine the visual design of the website. Implement filter algorithms. Run beta-testing versions. Fine-tune the ELO algorithm. Launch to the public.
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