Hi all, Would love some guidance on this issue. My junior son attends an arts and music high school - 3 of his courses each year are in his artistic field. His grades are much higher in his specialized arts classes than core academic classes. When we’re using Naviance to find schools that might be a good fit, should we just use his GPA from his care academic or his higher GPA that includes his arts classes? He’s applying to regular liberal arts schools that have good offerings in his field.
Realistically, if his academic class grades are low, his chances for admission may be lower than predicted by Naviance, unless your naviance only uses the academic GPA. Having a passion in art and music can also be a big plus in some holistic admission processes.
Our school gives each student and parent a login and when you login you see your student’s “dot” on the scattergram or your students stats in the data sections. I believe this was given at the junior year conference with the GC so you should be getting that soon. You could then back figure which GPA is being used.
It really makes sense to ask. If everyone’s GPA’s include three arts courses too, the Naviance data should be reasonably accurate. My son’s high school had a special arts program which meant that my son had two orchestra grades every semester that were figured into his GPA. There were quite a few kids in the program, but not ever high achiever also did the arts program. So we looked at the Naviance data with caution and figured his GPA without those grades as well. As it happens he generally did much better than we expected. My guess is he had stellar recommendations and that his essays were memorable. (Fun to read and nice self-deprecating humor.) He also, in at least one case, applied to an LAC which has very different acceptance rates depending on your gender - something Naviance doesn’t account for.