@socalmom007 Last fall, I asked our school counselor the same question you have posed. She said that our Naviance reflected end-of-junior year grades. I do think each school inputs data into Naviance slightly differently. I noticed that between my son’s junior and senior year, the information became more limited. It seemed like the counselors figured out how to manipulate Naviance to ensure better privacy for kids who applied to schools where there were not a lot of applicants.
The college admissions decisions were updated at the end of senior year. The counselor asked the kids for a written report of all of their admissions decisions, so that she could input them herself.
I can see where there could be privacy concerns, knowing we’ve had one student ever admitted to Harvard and a few top students who applied to other very exclusive schools, I can see their exact stats. I would venture to say ours isn’t closely monitored and is largely automated. Acceptances are logged, but I would bet everything else is just an automatic syncing.
Our kid’s school uses weighted GPA and as of end of Junior year. Perhaps they will update later for Senior year, but I doubt it because they would not have a good picture of all students since some kids would have applied EA and had only their Junior year grades.
The worst part about the Naviance sattergrams is that if you take both the SAT and ACT, and only use one of them for applications (because, say your SAT was really bad, but your ACT was fantastic) it will look like you were accepted at a school with an SAT that you didn’t even send in. The system should be updated when the applications go out with the actual SAT or ACT submitted, not the scores you have.
Do you think there’s that much variance between SAT and ACT scores though? My daughter’s test scores aren’t great, but her SAT and ACT’s are commensurate with each other. That being said, she is focusing only on ACT moving forward and prepping like crazy for it, so it her ACT goes up considerably I guess her posted SAT will be deceiving to next year’s students.
Our school does not show naviance info for schools where less than 4 or 5 kids have applied in the last five years. But if a lot of kids apply and only one is admitted, that could show up.
It doesn’t make sense to me to show anything but grades at time of application. End of senior year grades don’t really matter unless they go way down. I would certainly ask the GC but I wouldn’t presume that even if what you think is true for this Harvard kid, that would be true for all the data. Naviance gives info like lowest GPA admitted, at least at our school. Not sure how that would be helpful to future applicants if it showed end of senior year grades as opposed to grades at time of application.
@mom2and I agree, there are many flaws with the Naviance data. I think a good question would be “Is the GPA data entered manually or synced in real-time”. If the answer is “manually”, then we’d want to know when they stopped updating the data. It it is “synced” then we should assume it is to end of senior year unless they turn off the sync for seniors on a certain date.
Our HS appears to be synced and the grades change almost immediately with the end of the quarter. But I don’t know for sure (yet).
If I could add a few more rants about Naviance, which overall I love…
Why averages on "School Stats" page and not medians? Outliers really skew the mean.
Why not show colleges within universities acceptances?
Why no data points on gender or racial affiliation?
Why no option for self-reported hooks?
Why no data export feature?
(I realize some of these may be options our HS has chosen to not implement)
@socalmom007 Yes - I do think there can be big discrepancies. A kid applying to an tippity top school with a 35/36 ACT, but a 1450 SAT would look like they were in the top 75% for ACT but 25% for SAT. That is a big difference when you are looking at the schools graph and you see an Accepted green square at 1450 SAT for Tippity Top school… that student probably did not submit the 1450 - they submitted the 35. The school never saw the 1450… so its flawed data.
It is not very useful for a high school to update Naviance to include the final senior GPA. The vast majority of students are evaluated by colleges based on their end of junior year GPA, and that is the helpful information for a younger student trying to evaluate their odds.
The reason that hooks are not included in the Naviance data is to protect the privacy of the previous applicants. It is still very obvious on our Naviance scattergrams for highly selective schools that some of those low data points belong to athletes or other specially hooked candidates, especially when cross-referenced with the school newspaper listing college destinations for each graduate.
It definitely has flaws, but including senior year grades if you have the option not to just seems dumb. Ours seems to update fairly quickly after grading periods as well. My daughter took some classes at the local college over the summer and her naviance reflected that transcript almost immediately, again leading me to believe it’s all automated.