Thought I’d share some results from my daughter on Naviance/CollegeVine chancing odds from this cycle. I’ve been looking at Naviance scatter charts for a couple of years now, and had a hard time finding any discussions on results.
Naviance was fairly accurate in labeling schools as matches/safety - though the scattergrams would lead one to expect a couple of those WLs would be admits.
But I was surprised of how well CollegeVine chanced. If the chancing was over 60%, she got into 5 of the six schools, and waitlisted on the 6th. At 34% to 60% - waitlisted 4 of 4. 30% and under - one rejection. I’m guessing YMMV greatly in this exercise.
Here goes:
Notre Dame - Naviance Match / CollegeVine Hard Target - 48% chance - EA Def/ RD WL
Wake Forest - Naviance Match / Target - 67% chance - RD Admit
Congrats on her good results. I think one factor that the chancing may not account for is differences in programs, i.e. I think Villanova’s Business school is more competitive than other programs. Which college did she choose?
Thx. She committed to UVA. She’s super excited to be going there - and we are proud of her for the tough OOS acceptance.
At Villanova, she didn’t apply into the business school. From reading results on this board, they seemed to defer/waitlist quite a few high GPA/Test Score applicants.
I would argue that both Naviance and CollegeVine overestimated the chances for all of the colleges which had low acceptance rates.
ND, Duke, and Vanderbilt were all reaches, with less than 20% chance, and she was rejected.
UVA, Wake Forest, Emory, Villanova, and Boston were all high matches, and she was accepted to three and rejected from two - a great result for high matches, but not out of the ordinary.
UFL instate was probably a safety.
Do you mean U Miami in Miami, or Miami U in Ohio? If the former, a solid match to low match, if the latter, a safety.
In any case, a good year for her at her matches, a typical year for reaches, and safeties are safeties.
So, rather than CollegeVine being accurate, I would say that your daughter did well in putting her application together.
Also, your daughter likely has non-academic achievements which pushed her over the line for her matches.
Another frequently undernoticed factor is major or division that can make a big difference at colleges that do not have unitary admission to the college as a whole.
The chancing sites didn’t really play out well for my D22 because of the starkly different admit rates for CS majors. I would love to see chancing sites that are based on major instead of the overall school.
I’d add, possibly more important than the fact that Naviance doesn’t let you know if any of the students/dots have any of the types of hooks you mentioned, it also doesn’t tell you anything about their ECs and teacher recommendations. Were they superstars, beloved and admired by all teachers, who were presidents of their class, leaders of all sorts of things, super talented in many areas, etc? or were they just bumps on a log who got good test scores, but did nothing else of interest? The scatter plots are missing all of the “color”. They are helpful, but you have to look at each dot and think about it. Sometimes you can deduce, “oh I think that Accepted Student I see on the Princeton scatterplot with 1300 SATs and 3.4 GPA is Joey, the kid who is going to the Olympics for figure skating, so I’m going to ignore that dot.”,
Because of the reasons that others have mentioned above, Naviance is only useful when there are a good number kids who applied to a college from your school. Fewer than 40 or so, and all sorts of things can affect the pattern. @EmptyNestSoon2 gives a number of examples of cases which are not useful to anybody but kids who are similar to them.
However, when you have 40, 50, or more, you can start seeing the patterns which are the result of the two things that all students have - GPA and test scores (at least for colleges which still require test scores).
So one kid with a GPA of 3.6 may get stellar LoRs, and may have some other talent that is not obvious from the data (like Joey, the Olympic figure skater). However, if 30 kids with similar or higher SAT’s and GPAs were accepted, including 5 who were within this range, it is unlikely that these were all special cases, and one can assume that a kid with a GPA of 3.8 and an SAT of 1430 is almost certain to be accepted to this college.