Well, is it “better than nothing”? If it doesn’t help you in terms of what GPA you need from your school to be competitive for this college, then it’s not helpful in this respect is it? And as you said, plus Parchment’s self reporting nature, it’s probably not more useful than the common dataset.
Thanks for that detail - I had no idea! I looked at Parchment but can’t seem to find that particular page - can you send me a link
It is if you don’t have access to Naviance, which was how Parchment got brought into this conversation. Obviously, access to Naviance is ideal.
I don’t understand this thread. Choate has Naviance
Yes but they don’t have the accepted history data. And because of that you can’t tell how many were accepted in specific years and his many matriculated.
Choate must have changed their Naviance feed. Naviance for the class of 2015 showed apply/admit/enroll. For example, stats for Choaties and the University of Michigan looked like this:
Class Apply Admit Enroll
2014 40 16 3
2013 29 4 0
2012 17 4 1
2011 25 5 0
2010 26 14 3
2009 17 8 3
2008 21 11 0
You can no longer see this data?
recent Choate grad here, and I can say that you can in fact see the specific data of apply/admit/enroll! Dunno why you are not able to see, @ChoatieMom
@eaglehawk7: I was saying that when we went through the process in 2014, Choate’s Naviance data DID show apply/admit/enroll and I provided the example. Unless I am misunderstanding, some posters upthread are saying they cannot see this data now.
I always thought naviance was accurate, but I learned this year that it is not. At least at my kid’s school.
Kids are required to report something, but it’s not checked for accuracy.
So a lazy kid could just input the school he got accepted to, ignore all the ones he got rejected from, and he will have met the requirement and be cleared to graduate.
So it’s “semi self reported” data. Which really kills it’s usefulness.
Amazing for many of those years choate does below average in getting kids into Michigan.
Tufts syndrome perhaps? Even when admitted, few choose to attend. Nobody likes to be considered the last choice for the prom. 
tigermommy,
If you can, I would focus more on class rank than GPA when evaluating the importance of grades. Your niece may not know her exact class rank, but she can hopefully approximate it since many schools provide bar graphs that correlate GPA to class rank.
As a rough rule of thumb, my experience is that students within the top ten to twenty percent of elite prep schools compete well against public school students in the top five percent or so of their class. Hence, a student in the top ten percent at Choate may be functionally equivalent to the valedictorian of a public school if all other things are equal.
This is unfair to students at elite prep schools who often compete against scores of top students from throughout the world – ones who would have graduated at or very near the top of their local public schools, whether located in Boston or Beijing. Nevertheless, the days when elite prep schools were feeder institutions to the Ivy League are long gone.
This doesn’t mean Barnard or Wellesley will deny your niece if she’s closer to the fifth decile than the first decile of her class. But she should, of course, develop a sensible college list that includes safeties, matches, and reaches. More than that, she should adjust herself to the reality that attending prep school is not as beneficial as it once was in the college admission process.
^^^ Yes, college admissions will be comparing all of the Choate applicants to each other, not to the kids applying from public school, and they will do this on the basis of what they see on the “college profile” (or “school profile”) as well as comparisons of all the personal transcripts from Choate. So, when the OP asks at the top of the thread “how does this gpa from Choate compare to that one from p.s.?”, that’s not the way colleges look at the applications, at least considering the boarding school pool. (Maybe they do try to convert some of the public gpas to a common number scale.)
The transcripts will all allow them to compare grades earned in the same courses. The college profile will allow them to see what grouping the weighted or unweighted gpa puts the particular student in, and is the basis for roughing out the “class rank” alluded to above. Here is the profile, which most schools put on their website:
http://www.choate.edu/uploaded/Documents/Academics/College_Profile.pdf
At St. Andrew’s, the college profile shows the number of students earning different grades in each course, so that adds a layer to the analysis since admissions now gets a sense of the other students besides the applicants whose transcripts are in their hands:
http://www.standrews-de.org/data/files/gallery/ContentGallery/SchoolProfile201516.pdf
Just looking at her GPA, an unweighted GPAof 3.5 would put her just outside the top 30% of the class in Choate. I’d say she will be competitive for colleges LIKE Wellsley and Barnard in terms selectivity and popularity. Of course, admission is never just about GPA. It’s about course rigor, ECs, essays, etc etc. So a bet on one or two specific colleges is never wise. Instead, target a group of colleges at that “level”. All in all, she should continue working hard but there’s no reason to be pessimistic about her college prospect given her goals.
@8bagels: Some Choaties (mistakenly) use Michigan as a safety for MIT, CM, and the like. Michigan won’t play that game and does not have a lot of love for Choate (according to CC) and doesn’t admit many applicants as there have been too many zero enrollment years. Michigan asks Choate for a first-choice list (Mich doesn’t do ED); CC told ChoatieKid that if he really wanted Michigan, he would have to commit to the first-choice list and write the Choate reader a “burning letter of desire.”
Choate doesn’t get kids in anywhere. It simply prepares them well to hit the ground running at the colleges they attend.