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Parents hoping to admit their children into two popular Manhattan schools were left “stressed”after a glitch in the education department’s high school prediction tool butchered their odds of getting in.
The glitch — which skewed the odds for the NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies and Millennium High School — came just hours before applications were set to close on Wednesday.
“This is so strange and stressful,” one parent said on a private Facebook group in which the glitch first started to gain attention among parents.
Another parent called the notoriously complex high school application process a “joke.”
The “chance of receiving an offer” app — developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — debuted last summer and allows families to get a better idea of their kids’ chances of getting into certain schools and how to rank them.
The prediction tool takes a student’s randomly assigned “lottery” number and reviews it against the school’s selection criteria — such as borough, grades, admissions method.
It then spits out their chances to get into their desired schools between “low, medium and high.”
After discovering the tech issue, the DOE sent out an email to the parents of about 1,600 students who may have applied to high schools based on the incorrect predictions.
“We are writing to share an important update on MySchools’ ‘chance of receiving an offer’ feature. Unfortunately, the chance of offer shown for NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies and Millennium High School was incorrect for your child,” the email obtained by The Post read.
The DOE confirmed they had updated the feature to “reflect the correct chance of offer based on a correction in the program’s seat availability,” the email read.
Officials also told parents that they can still apply to those schools if they wish to do so.
Families affected by the glitch were given an extension to Jan 10, per the email.
Deborah Kross, the president of the Citywide Council on High Schools — a parent-led school board representing high school families across the five boroughs — told The Post the deadline for all other families was also extended to Monday, a grace period offered to parents most years.
Admissions results are still expected to be released March 6, Kross said before reassuring nervous parents that all was not lost.
“These are pretty popular schools, so I’m sure parents had others on the list, so I don’t think this [glitch] will mean people have to redo their entire application,” she said.
It comes after the DOE delayed the launch of middle school applications this fall due to technical problems with the MySchool portal.
Meanwhile, in February families fumed at the education department’s remote learning system after they were plagued with a series of glitches.
The Post has contacted the DOE for comment.
