@CaliMex they are using College Kickstart, too. I know nothing. Our email said we were to expect notes almost weekly from here on out. I’m guessing I’ll learn fast. ?
Naviance is customizable, so what is in it differs from school to school depending on how they choose to use it. Ours did track progress on the search, applications, etc. My kid had access to lots of parts I did not.
While I am not familiar with SCIOR, I’d guess it’s similar. These can cost quite a bit for the school and can require a lot of work to keep the data accurate (which is key to them being useful), do I would guess that most schools do assessments of these from time to time of what is most useful and cost effective.
One of the challenges of these for BS is the size of the data set. You want to have enough that it gives a picture and you also want to protect privacy. If only one kid went to Grinnell in the last 3 years, you will know that kid’s stats. But if you hide the info to protect his data, you lose all Grinnell history. Some deal with this by going back further ( 5 years, for example) but for many schools, their admissions profile 5 years ago is vastly different from what it is today.
This is a great tool for figuring out what to ask the CC about schools on your radar. When you see the kid who was accepted to a very competitive school with scores out of the cluster of dots, the CC will immediately know “that kid was a soloist at Carnegie Hall and was also the goalie for the All Prep first team in lax.”
Personally, I loved the school’s database. Super helpful.
St. Paul’s switched to Scior, as well. I think its a bit easier to navigate than Naviance and I like the heat map. The downside is that it doesn’t seem to indicate where your student falls - but that may change as I don’t think the school has input the student specific info yet (i.e. GPA, etc.)
We have Naviance, and it’s fascinating but I can also see the limitations. It is interesting (and heartening) to see how admitted students’ stats compare to colleges’ published stats, but of course as @gardenstategal says, you don’t know if an applicant with lower stats was a recruited athlete or stellar in some other way. And for the colleges applied to infrequently — like Midwest LACs — the data are easily skewed. You also can’t tell whether modest test scores belong to the same applicant with a B+ GPA or if a 4.0 applicant got away with lower test scores. It also seems that the feature that shows where else kids applying to a particular school applied can steer you toward the same, predictable group of schools. The data set from DS’s school is relatively small, so 1 or 2 kids admitted to a particular college with atypical stats can yield misleading (or at least head-scratching) results.
Of course this has only been my hobby so far, I don’t think DH has logged on, and DS May have with his CC…
Except @CTmom21, if it is an academically rigorous school, and there are some outliers that have been admitted, you DO know that they were athlectic recruits, or have some extraordinary thing that made the difference. Or at least that’s the case 90% of the time.
Check Naviance again – doesn’t it show, on the scattergrams, the gpa and scores of all that school’s applicants? (Forgive me for being obvious – personally I would have made this mistake when starting, but if you haven’t seen scattergrams, click on “Admissions” on the college’s page to bring it up).
@CTMom21 , if I had come to this site when my kid was making up his list and provided his GPA, I would have been told that all his schools, including the one he currently attends, were unrealistic. The colleges do understand the grading scales AND they know that as kid who is solidly middling at these BS is often a very strong student. Glad you can see that through the database. A slight balm for the anxiety!
And yes, if your school has set up the scattergrams, each dot is determined by GPA on one axis and scores on the other, so you canget as sense of what matters.
@cinnamon1212 I haven’t looked in a while but I feel like when I’ve looked for the scattergrams, they weren’t populated, or there was some reason I wasn’t seeing that view. But, yes, I think I saw it in a demo so I know what you mean.
Y’all are so ahead of me. We haven’t gotten a log in yet for any of these sites- DS says he hasn’t yet, either. They did have them do some other test on a site to let the kids know what areas they were strong in and majors to consider. His top 25 were all engineering, then a statistics was thrown in, followed by more types of engineering. Luckily, he had already decided to go into engineering…so I guess he’s on the right track.
Of note, his three worst fits were actor, real estate and flight attendant. ???
@buuzn03 You’re not alone. We also haven’t received access to scattergrams and the like yet, though I understand that access will be coming relatively soon.
A heads up - not all recruits appear on the scattergrams as outliers. For example, do not believe the Naviance GPA stats at NMH for Harvard which suggested when we were checking for 2016 that the average NMH student accepted at Harvard had just a 3.0 GPA. Many many Ivy basketball recruits at NMH as well as some other sports have made Naviance look suspiciously rosey at Ivies. The scattergrams at other BSs that produce a large number of recruits may be similarly flawed. “Regular” students from NMH do also go to the Ivies in respectable numbers - but they do not typically have a 3.0 GPA.
It’s strange but without even knowing what things look like on these sites, right now everything everyone is saying comes across like the teacher in Peanuts. My type A personality is struggling with this unknown and this incompetence ?
But I refuse to ask DS about it. Their grading window closes on Friday, so he’s in the thick of things and his brief calls home each night are a bit of a sacrifice among his busy schedule. So we chitchat about other things while my brain keeps screaming “what about Scoir? What about Kickstart? Give me a log in so I can figure out what’s going on!”
I hate that he’s our proverbial guinea pig, but I’m thankful he’s in the hands of capable CCs up there and not left to my devices at home…because we’d be completely lost!
@buuzn03, I know what you mean, and I can easily overwhelm DS by wanting a full run-down and all kinds of details. I have to bite my tongue and back off. College and Naviance are MY hobby for the moment. We have our big college symposium at the end of January, before winter break, and that is probably the next time he’ll think about anything college related unless he is required to meet with his CC before then.
And I figured out what I was missing with the scattergrams — I figured out switching between the school vs national graph (duh) and putting in ACTs (which DS has taken) vs SAT (for which he has only a disastrous PSAT score). I could probably do this all day 
Spring Break college tour trip is finally booked. DD will have to take SAT on the road, while the rest of us are touring college for her brother (that’s thanks to her epic failure of a mom who got her SAT date mixed up with her brother’s ACT date and so she missed the entire thing completely).
DS is only truly excited about one of the schools we are scheduled to see…but knows that opinions can change with visits, so he’s approaching it all with an open mind.
DD will also get a chance to see a BS that is off the beaten path, so it should be a productive trip. If nothing else, we’ll see part of the country as a family and make memories!
@buuzn03: I think you meant SSAT for your DD?
@ChoatieMom no ma’am. SSAT is next fall. She’s taking the SAT for Duke TIP.
Ah. Fingers crossed for her, then.
Thanks. She’s approaching it like her brother did. No prep, no pressure. Just an opportunity to see what taking a test like that is like. Hopefully, it will make things more comfortable for her when she does take the SSAT. I just feel bad she has to do it in a town she’s never been to before.
Regardless, it should be a great trip. I see numerous potential “stories” to be created!
@buuzn03 I told DS to relax about the PSAT. No pressure…he’s taking the ACTs, so no big deal. He relaxed so much that he forgot his calculator. I hope your DD is not quite that relaxed! She seems to be on top of things; good luck with Duke TIP! (And the rest of her BS process). Have an awesome trip!
New to this board, my son is at Cate. We are doing an East Coast road trip college tour for spring break - hoping it will keep me distracted until M10 decisions for my 8th grader!
@comtnmom welcome! I’m feeling your pain with application years back to back as ours will be simultaneous.
Where in the East coast are you headed? Northeast or Southeast? Where did your younger child apply? I keep hoping wherever mine end up, they’ll be somewhat close to each other.