Methodology & limitations
What this assessment can—and cannot—tell you.
NIWHQ is an independent research and preparation platform. It organizes evidence questions, historical context, and source-linked explanations; it does not provide legal advice or make an adjudication.
No approval probability
NIWHQ does not estimate a percentage chance of approval and does not use a 0–100 USCIS score. Immigration decisions are case-specific and the available datasets do not provide a representative denominator.
Approved-case survivor bias
Public approval summaries contain selected successful cases, often from law-firm clients. They do not represent every approved or filed petition.
AAO appeal-selection bias
AAO decisions describe a selected population of appeals and motions, not all denied petitions. They are useful for understanding reasoning—not denial rates.
Missing is not zero
A source may omit publications, citations, reviews, degrees, or roles. NIWHQ preserves unknown values instead of silently converting them to zero.
Country does not change substantive merit
Country of birth may later support chargeability information or transparent comparison filters. It does not increase or reduce evidence readiness.
Source-traceable research
The current research corpus includes 10,999 approved benchmark records and 12,375 AAO decisions. Displayed comparisons preserve source references, but the collections are not representative approval or denial populations.
Case Explorer
Case Explorer searches structured, case-specific findings from the current PostgreSQL corpus. Exact duplicate passages are suppressed, missing facts are omitted, and decision and finding counts remain separate. Search results are educational extraction—not a substitute for reading the source decision.
Transparent matching
Comparable cases are ranked by mutually observed features such as pathway, field, career context, evidence issue, and recency. Missing source values do not become zero. Similarity labels are explanatory groupings, never approval probabilities.
Legal framework boundary
NIW educational labels are organized around Matter of Dhanasar and EB-1A labels around the regulatory criteria and Kazarian final-merits framework. NIWHQ does not replace current authority review or individualized legal analysis.
Independent core experience
Assessment, benchmark retrieval, decision matching, evidence priorities, and Proposed Endeavor generation work without an external AI provider. No document upload or account is required for the current experience.