@thumper1 , unfortunately, ours did. That’s how I ended up knowing specifics about each kid, and how other parents and kids knew them about mine. One of the teachers at our school called Naviance “evil” and I think she was right, in our school’s case.
Our school hides Naviance data for schools with a small history of applicants. But our local HS is large, so we have great visibility for most of the top 50 schools.
Our school gives out info for even one applicant. It makes it easy to find out student info. Needless to say both DS and DD will be easily identified as they both are the only one for a few schools.
I am looking at his GPA on his student account as of the end of fall semester, it is 4.3275 ( he yelled it to me for my reply on this last post)… I was looking at his last complete report card for the unweighted number. (2016-2017) I read the CC instruction post stating you are to talk about unweighted. sorry to not compare apples to apples. My bad. His fall grades were really good. He is taking a lot of AP’s. Not sure if spring will be as good.
No we aren’t in SC. We have great state schools but they are huge and he wants to see another part of the country.
SMU… Not a lot of kids go there from his school but, yes, I think he could get in based just on ACT. Miami has been sending him stuff like crazy and it seems like a nice school. Yes, I think he could get into Miami with a 34. So if I don’t worry about EC’s that makes two safeties.
Good point about not comparing EC’s to other kids at school. I hadn’t thought of it in that light. The applications won’t be side by side. He does put in a lot of work into newspaper. I was just thinking it seemed kind of common…not flashy like his peers. Thanks for that thought it helps a lot!!! Amazing what a little reframing will do.
Is there another tool I should be using at this point? I don’t want to drive all over the South this summer based on this Naviance data looking at reach schools. When I started making my travel plans I needed a beginning point… that is why I started putting names into Naviance. Then the results freaked me out.
Sorry to be clueless. I have read some stuff on CC and I got the point about the importance about safeties…
@Massmomm WOW that is a big no-no in guidance counselor land. Your guidance counselor can change the settings on your school’s Naviance account so that acceptance info is blocked for any school that has less than x number of applicants. Once I have 10 applicants, I unblock the info.
Look at the Common Data Set on each of your college choice websites. This will give you the GPA and SAT/ACT ranges for I think enrolled students.
If your student’s stats are above the 75%ile…it’s probably a safe bet.
Thanks for all the information. Good stuff guys!
I will check out the Common Data Set. I need to get my head out of Naviance and chill. I didn’t mean to get bogged down in my own kid. 
I will let ya’ll know how the summer visits go in the Deep South.
Cheers!
In theory Naviance can be helpful in determining whether a college is a good admission safety (not necessarily financial safety). For example, between 1/3 and 1/2 of students from the HS I attended apply to the nearest SUNY, so sample size is huge. Among that huge sample size, Naviance shows that every applicant who had at least a 86 GPA and 24 ACT was accepted; which likely includes many who have both strong and weak ECs; so it’s a safe bet that students who are well above this stat range can be confident about their chance of admission, even if they have weak ECs or other weaknesses in their application.
However, in your case, a key limitation is likely to be sample size. Most students who get 34+ ACT have a much higher GPA, and most students who have 3.34 GPA have a much lower ACT. Even if a college on your list does have a good number of applicants, the sample size of applicants with similar stats is likely to be very small; so you’ll likely be guessing about whether the college is going to place more emphasis on the high ACT or relatively low GPA (assuming your HS does not grade abnormally harshly).
I assume you are full pay, right? If you need aid, I wouldn’t count on anything on your list as a safety.
What Naviance doesn’t show you is who are URMs, recruited athletes, legacies, and they are note worthy hooks. My kid’s private school had 30-40% of student been admitted to top 20 schools. As a newbie when D1 was applying, I naively thought if D1 was top 5-10%(fairly small class) of her class then she could surely get into a top 10 school. But when I pulled back the onions, I realized most of them were athletes or legacies with their families as major donors.
Perhaps you should consider speaking with the counselor a bit more. SMU, for example, has preexisting relationships with some private schools they know well that make it easier to get in with a more modest gpa. Not sure that would be applicable to your case. The problem with a high test score and comparatively low GPA is that it can be seen as a sign of laziness or immaturity. I am not in any way saying that is the case here but best to be prepared to explain the discrepancy with something other than the “courses were hard”.
My take on Naviance is that it can be a useful guide provided the HS has a history of a significant number of applications at schools you are interested in. When my son was applying, our interpretation of the scattergrams went something like this: If your circle lands in, or north east of a big field of green squares, the school is probably a safety; if the circle lands in a field of red x’s, you have virtually no chance; for anything in between, you have a chance, but it certainly isn’t a safety; and ignore weird accepted outliers on the plots, they’re probably recruited athletes, legacies, URM or some combination of all three.
If your HS has a lot of kids applying to these schools, then Naviance can be a good tool to show the GPA and scores that get accepted at a high rate. I found it was fairly accurate for all three of mine, when their GPA and scores put them in the upper right of the scattergrams. However, some schools definitely got more competitive and more popular from our HS which skewed the results. In our case, naviance used five years of data and for some schools the acceptance rate had dropped dramatically.
Although your HS does not rank, does it report deciles for GPAs? Where does he come in? Is that 3.34 a high unweighted GPA or not? That would make a difference.
In my (limited) experience, the reputation of a high school in terms of rigor and grading can make a difference in acceptance at colleges that know the HS. But I also know people who used their kids weighted average with data from the college to think their kid had a chance, when the school weighted very heavily and in reality the kid did not get into those reaches.
Make sure he has a safety he loves and some matches and no harm in trying for reaches.
Our Naviance doesn’t just contain numbers from the high school, it has the whole county. Which is good and bad - it means that we have a lot more data points in our data set, but it also has kids from wildly different socioeconomic backgrounds treated as one and the same. There is a high school magnet program in a fancy neighborhood that is probably skewing some acceptance numbers.
Naviance is a tool. It can be helpful if the data is accurate and there’s a lot of it (can show a kid “don’t bother” if NOBODY with a profile like yours has EVER been accepted to a college from your HS). It’s not that helpful if the GC’s don’t update senior year SAT scores and GPA’s, and it’s really not helpful if you live in NH and your kid is applying to Rice and nobody from your HS has ever applied to Rice.
Naviance data covers 3 years so theres no way to identify students. Its unfortunate because you cant tell which statistics applied to which year.
The number of years covered by Naviance data is up to the school. Ours used to have 7 years of data, but has recently reduced to 5, which makes sense given how quickly admit rates are lowering among selective schools.
In some cases, Naviance can be used exactly as you want to use it. That just isn’t the case for all colleges, though.
Back when my kids were applying to college, Naviance was very helpful in identifying one pretty high-quality private university as a safety. There were enough applicants from their school to provide a decent sample size, and when you looked at the graph there was a pretty clear downward-sloping diagonal line. Almost everyone (really, everyone) whose grades and SATs placed them above the line had been accepted, the line itself was really a fuzzy band of acceptances, waitlists, and rejections, and at some distance below that band only a few outliers – mainly athletes, I presumed – had been accepted. For that college, Naviance gave us great information.
Naviance also gave us great information about the most popular hyper-selective colleges. You could look at the charts and understand immediately that most of the people who got in had fairly high grades/scores, but that there was no clear advantage to having the highest grades and scores, and in fact only a tiny proportion of the top applicants were actually accepted. So the information Naviance gave us wasn’t necessarily welcome, but it was accurate, and it helped us understand that those colleges were looking at a lot more than grades and test scores.
In other cases, Naviance wasn’t helpful, because there wasn’t enough data, or there wasn’t a clear enough pattern from the data to make the information meaningful.
It would be a mistake to use Naviance as your only or your principal decisionmaking tool. But that doesn’t mean you should never bother checking it out.
In our case, it was extremely accurate. I’m sure that’s helped by the fact that it’s a larger HS (2000+ students) so more data points. We did have frustrations for a few small LACs far away where only a few kids had applied, so for privacy reasons, the results weren’t available. However, the guidance counselor had access, and was able to confirm we were on the right track for some safeties.
I particularly like Naviance because it gives you an idea how the schools weigh GPA; it’s a great part of the whole picture when you compare it to the common data set. I’d never take one thing as the entire picture, but it was a very useful part of the process.
Naviance is very ACCURATE.
That doesn’t mean it is highly PREDICTIVE for a given student.
“Needless to say both DS and DD will be easily identified as they both are the only one for a few schools.”
Only if they tell their classmates everywhere they are applying. Some kids don’t realize that they can choose to keep it to themselves and say, “I’ve decided to keep my list private” if asked.