<p>I have found the Princeton Review and College Data websites that let you plug in GPA and SAT info and they calculate your chances on getting into certain colleges. Have you found these to be accurate? Are there others you can recommend? Thanks!</p>
<p>If your high school subscribes to Naviance, you can see historical info plotted on admissions, rejections, waitlists from your school. It takes into account things like grading practices (grade inflation or deflation).</p>
<p>Remember that reach/match/safety should be based on whichever is more difficult to get out of admission, or the needed amount of financial aid and scholarships.</p>
<p>Thank you for your responses!</p>
<p>LBowie, son’s school hasnt started yet, I dont know if they have Naviance. That is something I need to find out for sure. </p>
<p>ucabalumnus, I am just trying to get a feel for schools that my son would be able to get into, and go from there. My hope is to weed out schools that his grades will make impossible for him to get admitted to in the first place. Then I planned on looking more closely at the cost. Is this the wrong process? This is all new (and oh so confusing) to me, and I am trying to find a starting point.</p>
<p>n general, if your child’s SAT/ACT scores and GPA fall into the mid-50% range for the school it is usually considered a “match”. If it falls on the bottom 25% or it is a school that has a low admit % rate (such as an Ivy) it is a “reach”. If your child’s scores/gpa are in the top 25% it should be a “safety.”</p>
<p>Other factors to consider are whether your student has any “hooks” such as a recruited athlete, child of alumni or status as an underrepresented minority.</p>
<p>Naviance was very accurate for our son. The web-based equivalents a little less so. They tended to be more conservative for him. How do you define accuracy? Match in my book means that you aren’t guaranteed to get in, but you are a competitive student. For my older son with topnotch scores and grades Harvard was a theoretical match, but obviously it’s a reach for almost anybody. For my younger son, a skyhigh CR score coupled with a much lower M score on the SAT made all predictions hard. He loved his safety and we figured most of his other schools were reaches or superreaches. He got into the reach schools and rejected from the superreaches, so presumably that math score was good enough.</p>
<p>Adding to PAMom’s info, look at the Common Data Set for schools, section C7, to see what importance criteria are assigned for admission. At some scores are optional and ECs may be very important, or vice versa.</p>
<p>remember that when a school looks like a match, because your student’s grades and scores are solidly within the middle 50%, also look at the overall rate of admission. If the school admits only a relatively small percentage of applicants, it really doesn’t qualify as a “match” because while a student may be competitive for admission, actual admission is still a relative crapshoot.</p>
<p>We started with costs first. We bought the Fiske Guide and identified 3 reach schools, 3 match schools, and 3 safety schools that S might be interested in. You don’t have to be perfectly correct when assigning schools but be reasonable. I did this only to get an estimate on some ultimate costs for us within each category.</p>
<p>So for reach, you might choose Northwestern, Rochester, and Bates College. Plug in your numbers and see what happens. I did this for quite a few more reaches and it became obvious that we were not going to be able to afford any reaches.</p>
<p>For matches, you might choose Lafeyette, Bucknell, and Furman. I did the same thing as above just to get an idea of the costs. Again, it became apparent that we were not going to be able to afford any matches or slight reaches.</p>
<p>For safeties, we looked at Centre College, Hendrix College and Rhodes. These all turned out to be within our budget financially but alot of other sfeties were not affordable (Puget Sound as an example).</p>
<p>Moral of the story…start with costs first or you risk spending too much time on places you can never afford. Or, your S falls in love with his ‘dream’ school that turns out o be unaffordable. Look for private schools where your S is in the top 25% of students and run the numbers.</p>
<p>Don’t discount state schools. There are some state schools that give good merit to OOS students and these are actually more affordable to us than most private schools. Examples…</p>
<p>Alabama
Ole Miss
LSU
Montana State
Minnesota
Iowa State
Iowa
New Mexico
Idaho
Miami (OH)
Ohio State
Truman State (MO)
Kansas</p>
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<p>I generally agree with this, but I think you need to put more emphasis on the admissions rate of the school.</p>
<p>If the school has a low admit rate, being in the top 25% and unhooked simply means your kid is a viable candidate. It is definitely NOT a match. </p>
<p>If you look at the stats of Dartmouth, which happens to publish detailed SAT admit rates on its web site, you will discover that 8.2% of applicants present an 800 on the CR section, and that 32% of them are admitted. That means that 68% of students presenting a perfect CR score are rejected. Those scoring 700-790, which encompasses most of the middle 50%, and part of the top 25% (780-800) are admitted at a rate of only 14.8%. The 600-690 range drops off sharply to 5.3%. (And I think you can be fairly certain that virtually all the admitted students with those stats are hooked.) I would not really call that a “match” school for anyone. </p>
<p>Now, if the school accept 40% or more of applicants and you are in the top 25%, I would call it a match</p>
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<p>Definitely.</p>
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<p>This mainly applies to colleges where the non-academic-stats factors get magnified in importance. This includes the super-selective schools which can fill their freshman classes several times over with near-maximum academic stats applicants, and admissions to specialty schools or programs that require things like auditions for music performance.</p>
<p>Some other schools with low admit rates (e.g. CSU East Bay at something like 23%) are not very selective at all, but apparently get a lot of applications from students who do not even meet their published minimums, or complete their applications after initially applying.</p>
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<p>The early screens should include:
- Eliminating out-of-reach schools based on academic qualifications for admission.
- Eliminating out-of-reach schools based on cost and lack of sufficient financial aid and merit scholarship opportunities (note that if a merit scholarship is needed to be able to afford it, the reach/match/safety assessment has to be based on getting the merit scholarship, not merely admission).
- Eliminating schools which are academically inappropriate (e.g. does not offer intended or possible majors, or does not offer a range of major subjects that could interest an undecided student).</p>
<p>Heres what I use to figure out where a school falls for admissions (note that I am pretty conservative; I’d rather be surprised by an acceptance than disappointed with an expected admission being a waitlist or rejection) Financial categories are a different item.</p>
<p>Safety: A school with a 40% or higher acceptance rate where your GPA AND SAT scores are both in the top 25% (i.e. above the published 25-75%)</p>
<p>Match:
- A school with a 25%-40% acceptance rate with your scores and GPA both in the top 25%, or
- a school with a 40% or higher acceptance rate with your scores and grades both in the middle 50%</p>
<p>Reach:
- A school with a 25-40% acceptance rate with your scores & GPA in the middle 50% or
- A school with a 40% or greater acceptance rate where your stats are in the bottom 25%, or
Super reach: - A school with a 25%-40% acceptance rate where either your GPA or SAT is in the bottom 25% and the other is in the middle 50%.
- A school where the acceptance rate is under 25% regardless of where your scores and GPA fall.</p>
<p>Of course, the reliance on school supplied SAT data presumes the information is actually true. Not always the case, apparently.</p>
<p>Agreeng with ucb’s notes here, including the financial filtering.</p>
<p>My take: most of the non-public, attention-getting schools (that’s far more than tippy-top) have some degree of holistic reviews.</p>
<p>It can be misleading to just see your if kid is in the top 25% or mid-50%, if he/she doesn’t have the rest of the picture those college look for. People review, not computers- and, their goal is kids they think are matches for their schools- that’s more than stats.</p>
<p>We flipped this around: she wanted an LAC. She was set on her major, so we closely checked course offerings and profs’ interests (and more.) It was clear where her interests/strengths matched what the depts had to offer. We looked at whether her pattern of ECs, responsibilities, experiences and goals seemed to match the sorts of kids the schools themselves touted on the web or wherever. We ended up with a set of “qualitative” matches.</p>
<p>Because her SATs were lopsided- and not that great- we only used the freshman profiles to get a vague sense of the competition’s academic drive. The one LAC that rejected her, ironically, was a last minute/last choice/what the heck add that specialized in a different area of her humanities field. (Added so late that I never even asked why.) And, the Ivy rejected her- I knew they would have loved her in the dept, but we all know how it is with Ivies. She’s at her #1, a top LAC that statistically would have seemed out of reach.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to define “reaches” when you have a high stat student. Our kids have the “stats” to get into every school in the country, for example, but the 5-9% acceptance rates at those schools make them “reaches”. We have based more of our search on cost and availability of merit money since we won’t qualify for financial aid. With the exception of one school, our kids are not applying to any “reach” schools in our definition.</p>
<p>As others have said, pamom59’s simple rubric is really misleading. If you are looking at a college with a 10% admit rate overall, being in the top 25% of GPA and test scores doesn’t mean anything. The college is still a reach. If it is in the next tier of 10-30% admission rate, it is probably still a reach, or at best a high match. It’s nothing like a safety.</p>
<p>A school is a safety if (a) it has predictable admissions based on objective criteria, and you meet the criteria, and (b) you know that you will be able to afford it.</p>
<p>High-stat students don’t have matches, generally. Their matches are all reaches.</p>
<p>Alternatively, not being in the top 25% on both portions of the SAT does not mean it’s an impossiblity. If your math score is, say above the supposed magic 25% threshold, and your CR score is somewhere close or maybe around the median (assuming you even know the median) that doesn’t necessarily mean you should automatically write off any school. It may be a bit of a reach, but we all know they look at the whole application. </p>
<p>I actually don’t even understand why people talk about the mid-50% range. What you are given is a score above which 25% of the students scored, and another score below which 25% of the students scored. To me, that doesn’t necessarily mean that only 25% scored above 750, or that only 25% scored below 600. Let’s say the upper 25% score is given as 750, and the lower 25% score is given as 600. Can anybody tell me the distribution of scores between those two levels? Given only this information, isn’t it possible that 74% of the students scored over 750 , or that 74% scored under 600. Not likely, granted, but possible.</p>
<p>Am I seeing this correctly?</p>
<p>I guess what I’m saying is that given only these numbers, it’s a pretty rough cut at the data.</p>
<p>I don’t know if it’s a JHS original, but this:
is the best definition I’ve seen yet for a safety school.</p>
<p>Edit: I guess you are given the mid 50% range, but not the breakdown in that range, so I corrected that.</p>
<p>I also think it is very important to use your own Naviance and school acceptance records if you have access to it. Our Naviance isn’t all that helpful for the really top colleges, but for those a bit down it helps the prediction game. For example, our local HS (California) posts very detailed admissions records. For the last class, 199 applied to UCLA, 54 were accepted and 145 denied. However, of the 145 denied, only two were in the top 10% rank by GPA. And of those two, one got into Cal, and the other one didn’t apply to Cal but got into all the other UC they applied to. So I don’t know if I would call it a safety, but if you are in the top 10%, or certainly the top 5% at our local high school, with reasonable test scores, UCLA is a reasonable bet.</p>
<p>I don’t know why so many people are saying Pamom’s rubric is bad. She specifically stated low admission rate schools are reaches.
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Bovertine, that’s exactly what that means. You don’t know the distribution between, above or below, but you do know that 25% of scorers were above 750 and 25% of scorers were below 600.</p>