I am looking at Naviance and my daughter is always at the top of the scattergram on GPA, SAT and ACT compared to all the girls at her school.
The questions is how reliable is this as a tool to predict/estimate college admissions?
It was mostly accurate for my daughter with the exception of U. of Michigan, where even a friend with perfect scores and grades was wait listed. Case Western was also not accurate for some of her friends.
What we heard after the fact was that it can depend on intended major. For example, engineering or CS can be more competitive at some schools.
Depends in part how old the data is. My kids’ school includes only the most recent 3 years of data. Many schools have gotten much more competitive than they were 10 or even 5 years ago.
I found that Naviance really didn’t predict things all that well for the high end schools. Limited data, old data and important missing data (like controlling for athlete, legacy, URM, ED, RD, in state, out of state).
For top tier selective schools, I found it most helpful to look at the school specific admit results threads here on CC for the previous application cycle. Seeing the actual posted results for 10-20 kids at a particular school gives you a good feel for how it works beyond the stats. That’s where you can see how an unhooked RD 35 ACT kid will often get rejected while a hooked ED 31 ACT kid often gets accepted.
Those postings often disclose how kids are doing at other schools too. That can help a lot too, since you can see how the same kid does at somewhat similar schools.
For holistic schools under 10% acceptance rate (and there are nearly twenty of them) Naviance is useless in predicting chances.
Useless. Doesn’t help to know the high school’s results since liberal arts and engineering were thrown into the same bin.
At my school, it isn’t that accurate. I go to a school in CT, and for UConn, for example, all of the branches are included in the stats, which are easier to get into, so the stats are lower than they should be. A lot of the data is also kind of old. Not to mention that SAT/GPA is only a portion of college admissions, and other things are taken into account that Naviance does not include like ECs, Awards, SAT IIs, etc.
For my DD going to one of our state schools, it helped her to know how she would do when applying ED.
S2 was as far up in the upper right quadrant as you can get and had little green checks all around his blue circle for UCB and UCLA. But it was not to be. Definitely take it with a grain of salt.
S3 is right on the red/blue border in Naviance for UCD, UCI, UCSD. I’m hoping the Naviance uncertainly principle works in our favor on this one! Parchment gives him much better odds. Maybe it’s because so many high achievers come from his school the UC’s say “we’ve seen enough - let’s get some kids from Madera”…
OP here.
The uncertainty of not having any good tool is killing us.
Is very unfortunate because my dougther wants to apply to only 3 top schools and that’s it.
As long as she is guaranteed to be admitted and it is an affordable option for your family, then it is all good. If not, then she needs to cast a wide net as guaranteed scholarships have become competitive and students grow a lot during senior year; while there may only be 3 schools that she is interested now (hopefully not all 3 are HYP), you don’t want her to have buyers remorse.
If you look at the common data set, where does her stats fall among students who were admitted and matriculated to the school(s)?
What top three schools? What are her SAT or ACT scores, and her GPA? What other things are on her application that make her feel she is guaranteed admission to these schools?
Can you afford to pay? Have you runnnet price calculators at these top three schools to see if they are within your family price point?
Do you have twins? You had a son who supposedly took the PSAT last fall. If he was a junior, that would make him a senior now also.
It also depends on the quantity of data, and on the importance of grades and scores alone in predicting admission to the schools that interest you. At many “top” schools, good stats are necessary but not sufficient.
No tool can completely account for the subjective factors that influence holistic admissions.
Therefore, some colleges should be considered reaches for nearly everyone.
Naviance worked well for us, with admits for those schools where each was within the “green” and mixed results where each was in the “maybe” zone. At the very tippy top schools Naviance also shows how difficult it is to get admitted, where there are only a few greens, a number of blue (“wait lists”) and many red denials. It is a great tool for matches and safeties, but reaches, and especially high reaches, are schools where a kid has a chance, but where even kids with almost perfect stats are not necessarily admits. Our HS is a large, well-regarded, competitive suburban school. Not sure how well this would work for much smaller or less challenging HSs.
Not to be harsh, but your daughter’s strategy has a lot of risk. As a parent, I would be sure she understands that even if she is at the top of her class, there are thousands of other kids that are at the top of their HS classes. Many of the top schools have over 90% DENIAL rates. I am sure you know some of this, but really need to get the message to her.
She needs to understand that she could be shut out of all three. I would recommend a parent-required application to a safety or two.
I found our Naviance was very accurate as long as you controlled for major. If you know that you are applying to a selective major in an otherwise less selective school, the tool is useless. For the top schools with 15% or lower admit rates, you really don’t need Naviance at all. You know up front that the chances are minuscule regardless of stats.
The type of school you attend also makes a difference. Our high school is very homogeneous so its a pretty good assumption that few of the dots represent “hooks.” There may be a couple of recruited athletes or legacies but very very few URM or first gen. In a more diverse school, the graphs may not be as applicable.
General understanding is greater data points will have better accuracy.
Useful tool to brag about student’s GPA/SAT scores being equal to Ivie acceptances threshold. We find some local universities are very accurate because acceptance rate is much higher. Lower the acceptance rate not that reliable.
My recommendation is choose major first, not the school.
Good Luck,
“Useless” is far too strong a characterization in general, but certainly the information is less and less useful the fewer examples there are due to issues like athletic hook, major, etc., as mentioned above, as well as the size of the student body. In my sons’ school, for example, many of Ivy-ish school data is useless because so many of the admits were student-athletes—now, most of the them were also exceptional students, but when multiple HYPS kids both were recruited for varsity sports AND had 4.0 GPA/35-36 ACT, it is hard to know exactly what to make of the data. However, if you have 75+ admits over a three-year period, showing a very definite pattern of GPA and test scores, it certainly is telling you something. Ideally, the college counselor is on top of the information enough to know how to parse it.
We found Naviance to be quite accurate with some of the caveats above. My younger son may have come close to setting a few low dots - his SAT scores were much better than his grades, and his SAT were pretty lopsided. Naviance will help you see which colleges seem to care more about grades vs GPAs. It will show you which colleges are completely out of reach.
It was interesting to see that half the kids with my older sons GPA and SAT scores got into Harvard. So the big question was - were his activities as good as previous applicants? He did get in.
It would be nice for a place like Carnegie Mellon where acceptance rates are so different depending on what school you apply to if the high school took that into account. If you are applying to a school like that it might be worth talking to the GC and find out what she can tell you. I learned that the only two kids to get into Stanford (with much lower scores than most students who had applied and been rejected) were both recruited athletes and URMs.
Ask the counselor, who has a better sense of the data. At one famous LA private school, the 13 kids admitted to Princeton in 3 years looked strong-until you learned that 11 of them were hooked.
Useless for us.
Kid one…music performance so the Naviance data was…useless.
Kid 2 was the first at her high school or nearby high schools to apply to her university. There wasn’t any Naviance data…and there still isn’t on that college…sample of one doesn’t get included.