The Heard Back Tracker

Every cell in the heatmap has the same denominator: applications sent to that school in that period. The numerator — the count of applications that have received something back — changes depending on which mode you pick.

All Responses (the default) counts any substantive contact from the school: an acceptance, a rejection, a waitlist offer, or a hold. This is the mode you want during the heart of cycle, when most of the signal about whether a school has reached your part of the pool comes from waitlists and holds rather than from final decisions.

Decisions narrows the numerator to terminal outcomes only — acceptances and rejections. Waitlists and holds are excluded. Use this view when you want to know how many applicants from a given period have a definitive answer, not just an acknowledgement. Late in the cycle the two numbers converge, because most waitlists and holds eventually resolve.

Rows are grouped by application sent date into three buckets per month: Early (1st–10th), Mid (11th–20th), and Late (21st through the end of the month). A row labeled "Late Nov" contains every application sent between November 21 and November 30. The leftmost column holds the bucket label; each row is nested under a month header so you can scan down a column and see the progression from September through the spring.

Ten-day buckets are a compromise between resolution and sample size. Day-by-day percentages would whipsaw on small numbers and obscure the underlying trend. Bucketing smooths the noise while still letting you see that, for example, applicants who submitted in early October have heard back at meaningfully higher rates than those who submitted in late October. If a row near the top or bottom of the table looks sparse, it usually means few applicants happened to submit in that window — not that those schools have been quiet.

A cell is the share of applications sent to one school during one ten-day period that have received a response in the current mode. Hover a cell to see the raw numerator and denominator — for example, 42/60 means 60 LSD users reported sending an application to that school in that period and 42 of them have heard back. Darker cells mean higher percentages.

When fewer than three applications land in a cell, the heatmap suppresses the percentage and shows N/A instead. Three is not a statistically meaningful sample; the suppression keeps a lone early applicant's single acceptance from lighting up a cell at 100%. Expect sparse cells at the very start of the cycle and in the tail rows after most applicants have already submitted.

One subtlety: the denominator counts applications, not applicants. Someone who applied to twelve schools shows up in twelve different columns. For individual outcomes as they arrive, the recent decisions feed is the companion view.

On first visit the tracker loads the Top 14 from LSD's most recent ranking, ordered by rank. Use the search box to add any ABA-accredited school to the table, and click the small × above a column header to remove one. The "Reset to Top 14" button restores the default set.

Your selected schools and your mode preference are saved to your browser's local storage, not to your LSD account, so the table looks the same when you come back on the same device but will not follow you to a different browser. Build a column list that matches your actual application list so the table tracks the schools you actually care about.

For aggregate pace across the cycle rather than per-school response rates, see the cycle tracker guide.