How does Naviance know where students from each school are accepted? Is it simply self reporting by students or do the college actually notify the high school of acceptances? I ask because I have heard of a few instances of students lying to each other about where they have been accepted. If the Naviance data is based on self reports, that could be skewing those scatterplots.
Generally, Naviance data is self-reported. I’m sure it varies from school to school, but my son’s school requires a survey prior to graduation with outcomes. This information is then input into Naviance by the counselor. The school is aware of which schools the student applied to, as they sent transcripts. If a survey raises questions, the school counselor will follow up. In addition, at least in the smaller, private high schools, school counselors are in communications with the college admissions counselors. They know where the students have been accepted and denied. I would hope this would be the case for all high school counselors, but i’m doubtful.
I believe the greater concern regarding scattergram reliability is in the number of years the data represents rather than errors or instances of lying. College admissions has changed dramatically even in just the last few years.