Making sense of HS Naviance data

So I attend a public school in NJ; 500 kids per grade, ~1200 avg SAT. My school uses naviance, so we can see scattergrams with applicant gpa/scores, ed/rd, number applied/accepted/enrolled at a school per year, etc.

As expected, we have very sparse and sporadic acceptances at top schools (~10 / 2% enroll at t20s per year) and none to 8/20 of them in ≥10 years. There’s one outlier, UPenn (about half an hour away), which takes 4-10 kids every single year. ~10%+ of the class applies. Judging from their stats, none were (unqualified) hooked kids; I can tell from their weighted GPAs they must’ve been top 5% if not vals.

I’m not too sure what to make of all this, though. Since the school is near UPenn, I assume there might be some legacies/staff kids, but I’ve never seen any indication of this. Asking the kids who got accepted this/last year, none were hooked and all were non-Wharton.

As a very stereotypical unhooked applicant (middle class asian 4.0 1600 type, only difference being not cs/econ/premed) who likes upenn anyway, would that all suggest that ED is the way to go (ignoring FA obviously) considering my school’s admit history or am I just drawing the wrong conclusions?

Thanks for any help!

The guidance counselors have a way to separate the hooked vs unhooked scatterplots. That view is not visible to the students. My guess is that the Penn students who were accepted were academic superstars (val or salutatorian) plus had great test scores.

Its pretty easy to spot a hooked candidate – especially if you see they were accepted despite not having a good GPA or test score.

It sounds like your HS has a decent relationship with Penn. If you are at the top of your class, then you probably have a good shot. Ask your guidance counselor. ED deadline has already passed, so your only option is RD.

Interesting. If my school admits are legacies, then they’re statistically indistinguishable from the other top applicants. No range of sure admits, just a cluster of red in the upper right corner ~1550+ and ~6.7+/7 W GPA with a few green points sprinkled in. Asking the ~6 ED admits from this year, no legacies or hooks—5/6 just plain high stats Asian kids, 5/6 premed and one engineering.

I’m a junior atm but I currently have a 4.0uw/7.0w (no idea but I guess my school must be inflated at least somewhat bc literally 14 valedictorians last year; a person could take 5 AP core classes, three study halls, and still have a 7.0) and a solid sat, so I guess the best I can do now is keep the grades up and work on EC involvement, then just go for ED and cross fingers hoping there’s an institutional need to fill my major. sound reasonable?

While an outlier admit on the low end is probably a (strongly) hooked admit, there can be some hooked admits whose GPA and test scores are in the main grouping of admits. Some may have been strong enough to get admitted without the hook, while others may have had strong GPA and test scores but lack of strength in other areas (e.g. course selection rigor, ECs, essays, recommendations) that the hook may have compensated for.

Based on my son’s class, where 6 got into Penn ED and none were hooked in any way, I don’t think you need to assume those kids have hooks you don’t.

But this is a great way to use Naviance and your GC together. Have the conversation about what’s behind the data. Does the GC have any sense of what distinguished those kids? Was it that they applied ED? Remember that grades and scores are a screen, which you have met. They aren’t the reason for admission.

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