How to Check an Admissions Statistic From an AI Assistant: A Checklist for Advisors and Students

Why This Needs Its Own Checklist

Students and advisors now ask AI assistants where an applicant can get in, how many schools to apply to and what a good score is. The answers read well. The problem is that admissions numbers fail in specific, repeatable ways, and a fluent sentence hides which way. The seven checks below catch most of them. None needs special tools, only the habit of asking what a number describes.

The Seven Checks

1. What is the source, and what year? A figure with no named source, such as an ABA 509 report, an AAMC FACTS table or a school's class profile, cannot be checked. A figure with a source but no year may describe a class that applied several cycles ago.
2. What population does it describe? ABA 509 percentiles describe the students who enrolled. The AAMC's 45.1% acceptance figure (Table A-23, 2023-24 to 2025-26) is the share of applicants accepted to at least one school, not any school's rate. National and per-school numbers answer different questions.
3. Which scale? The DAT moved from 1-30 to 200-600 on March 1, 2025. The GMAT Focus Edition runs 205 to 805 and the earlier GMAT 200 to 800; GMAC says the two are not comparable. A "20" and a "420" can both be a good DAT, depending on the date.
4. Which rate? Acceptance rate is offers divided by applications; yield is matriculants divided by offers; matriculation rate is matriculants divided by applications. Harvard Law's 2025 numbers were 9.2%, 59.2% and 5.4%. Our guide to the three rates shows the arithmetic.
5. Is the rule current? The PCAT was retired on January 10, 2024, so a guide telling a pharmacy applicant to prepare for it is out of date. LSAC requires in-person LSAT testing from the August 2026 administration. See every professional-school admissions test and its scale.
6. Median, mean or cutoff? The AAMC's 512.1 is a mean MCAT for 2025-26 matriculants; a school's profile usually gives a median; neither is a cutoff. Half of an enrolled class is below its median.
7. Can you confirm it at the primary source? This is the check that settles the others. The sources are free for law (ABA 509 reports) and medicine (the AAMC's FACTS tables); medical school medians are otherwise in each school's class profile or the paid MSAR database.

Where Each Number Comes From

What Good Sourcing Looks Like

A trustworthy admissions page names its source for the figure it shows, links the primary document where one exists, states the data year, and says plainly when a number is an estimate. On AdmitBase, a school page that shows admissions figures carries a "Data source" line with the cited document and its year, and a page whose medians are not school-reported says so in an "Estimated figures" notice. The same statistics are available to AI assistants through AdmitBase's free MCP server, which returns each school's figures with their data year and a link to the school's page, where the source is cited, so an assistant that supports it can fetch them instead of recalling them.

For Advisors Whose Students Use AI

• Ask for the source before the number. A student who can name the report and the year has done most of the checking.
• Make scale part of the conversation. It is the error students are least likely to catch on their own.
• Keep a primary-source habit. The free calculators for law, medicine and other programs link each school's source, so a student can move from an AI answer to the document in one click.