I’m wondering if anyone has feedback on whether the scattergram of students admitted/rejected/considering on the College Niche website are accurate? It says the data is provided by Niche users. I’m assuming this is probably a biased sample (it’s certainly self-selected, i.e. those who are obsessed with college admissions and choose to share their information with Niche). So while it doesn’t represent all applicants, it probably is a pretty good sample of those similar to my daughter (those applying to top colleges).
I picked one school and compared the range of SAT scores (the 25%-75%) to that posted on collegeboard. I did this by setting her profile SAT to the 25% range and the GPA to the average GPA, and found it said she was above 33% of applicants. I did the same for the 75% score, and it said she was above 82% of applicants. The high end might be because students with higher SATs have lower GPAs on average, but this wouldn’t explain the low end.
I’d love to hear what others think about this tool. Thanks!
I found it to be oddly accurate for DD16. More accurate than Naviance for her school district as there are very few students in her school district that were looking at the OOS schools she was interested in applying too. I felt this was a good tool for measuring the possibility.
My D used Niche. We found it to be an accurate assessment of where she fell within the student pool. But who knows how accurate it actually is? I think the biggest issues could arise in terms of GPA. So mny stduents don’t know that UW GPA is supposed to be used. It’s only going to be as accurate as whoever puts in the data.
@pantha33m . It seemed to be accurate with regard to accepted but only slightly more so than rejected, I don’t know how diligent people are about coming back to report acceptances/rejections. Our school district’s Naviance stats are not accurately recorded by individual campuses and as students are not required to use it, not entirely reflective of who is actually applying where and if they were accepted/rejected. My DD diligently reported her info, many of her classmates did not or only partially completed info. Also, some of her SAT/ACT test score were not uploaded by the school district so we felt you couldn’t entirely trust the accuracy of the stats. (It reflect some of her lower scores).
@labegg Thanks - our Naviance is also of limited value since it’s a small school and students have only applied in big numbers to a relatively small number of schools.
Naviance wasn’t useful for us because too few students at my son’s high school had applied to the colleges he chose. If you are ok with self-reported data, then CollegeData is more valuable than Niche, IMHO:
CollegeData allows you to check boxes for standard, legacy, athlete, male, female, RD, EA/ED, class year, public HS, private HS, in state, OOS, etc. The fewer boxes you check, the more sparse the data, obviously. Even with just a few data points though, you can get a feel for the possibility of acceptance/denial.
Thanks, I didn’t know about Collegedata. I just started using Parchment, which also tracks legacy status and whether you are applying early decision or regular decision, which we know can make a difference. My daughter’s school uses naviance, but it’s such a small school (only 30 per grade) that it’s not much use.
I re-looked at some schools via Niche this weekend and it looked like on the whole the acceptance percentages mostly dropped. I wonder if that’s the result of a big update from 2017.
On the other hand, I have found the Cappex “What are my chances?” calculator to be more or less useless (and for some schools wildly inaccurate/implausible).