Technical students have no reliable way to know how good they are. Grades don't work because they vary by professor and university. Getting internships can boil down to arbitrary indicators, and online advice is filled with contradictions.
Athletes have it better. A college football player knows exactly where they stand nationally (e.g. https://www.espn.com/college-sports/football/recruiting/play...).
More importantly, they know what the best players do differently: their training methods, their practice routines, the specific skills they're mastering.
CS students are flying blind by comparison. They face a collapsing job market with nothing but twitter threads giving them contradictory advice.
We built Crackd to fix this. Students judge pairs of technical students, and choose the person they believe is more “cracked.” After enough comparisons, the Elo algorithm generates a leaderboard. Humans are terrible at absolute judgments but good at comparisons. You can't reliably say if someone is a 7/10 developer, but you can usually tell who has a better profile based on technical achievement.
What matters about Crackd is letting other students see precisely what the top students do differently. Their projects, internships, skills, school clubs, etc. This is the information that turns rankings from a leaderboard into a roadmap for ambitious students.
For the time being, Crackd is restricted to college students as we refine our platform and build our initial community.
We're attempting to cover as many dimensions of technical skill as possible, covering projects, experiences, and including a miscellaneous section so students can add whatever info they feel showcases their best work. But we'd love your feedback on what other dimensions we should include to create the most comprehensive assessment of technical capability. We would love to hear from you at contact@crackd.io