<p>DS#2 just moved to a new school that uses Naviance. I know I'll figure it out over the coming weeks/months, but can somebody tell me what you mostly use it for? I've been through the college search with DS#1 already (and like all CCers feel like I know everything there is to know). I <em>believe</em> Naviance has information on where kids from your school have applied/been accepted? Maybe with stats (GPA/SAT) on them? Am I close?</p>
<p>Anything that's particularly useful about this site that isn't available from all those other college sites we know and love?</p>
<p>ingerp,
Our school is starting to use Naviance within the next week. From what I have seen, the main benefit is that schools use a number of years of data and make “plot points” with one axis showing SAT score and the other showing GPA. The plot points are in different colors-I believe the scheme is red for rejection, green for an acceptance and blue for a waitlist. Of course, what it doesn’t tell you is things like whether the applicant was a legacy, a URM, a recruited athlete, etc.</p>
<p>Yes, you understand correctly. And you can see the information displayed visually on a scattergram, which is kind of fun. You get good usable information for popular schools that get a lot of applications. But it can be skewed badly if there aren’t many data points from your school. And if there are only a few applicants it may show nothing (“this data is restricted for privacy purposes”
If you can get the GC to go over the results with you, it’s even more accurate because they can point out exceptions, such as recruited athletes.
another helpful feature: you can make a list of the colleges that you are interested in,and get all the stats at one time for comparison. look for the “my colleges” tab.</p>
<p>Good. I love scatter plots! (So it’s one plot per college? So I guess limited to where kids from your school tend to apply? And access is only to your own school’s information? Does anybody share this info? Like maybe I’m looking at LACs in <state 300=“” miles=“” away=“”> so it’d be helpful to look how a similar high school in the area did with their admissions?)</state></p>
<p>Our school didn’t use Naviance, but I was able to log on to enough guest accounts to get an idea of various colleges acceptance profiles by viewing the scattergrams. Bottom line - “average” test scores/grades mark out the lower bound of the bulk of acceptances, with outliers (athletes?) dragging the averages down. (“average” being the stated average score of accepted students). It was also pretty clear that some colleges use a minimum GPA as a cutoff, with all rejections coming from below that GPA.</p>
<p>I would just note that you have to take the information with a grain of salt, because it’s only as good as the data that are entered. At my kids’ school, the data is good for some years, but obviously incomplete or messed up for other years.</p>
<p>The availability of the scatter plots in Naviance depends on the implementation that the high school chooses. Our high school does not make the scatter plots available yet, as they have some concerns about confidentiality. What is available is a tabular presentation of data, including how many kids applied (both RA and ED), the average GPA and SAT scores of those accepted (both RA and ED), the average GPA and SAT scores of those who applied, and the lowest GPA and SAT scores of those accepted.</p>
<p>I think the data on your HS specific GPA is particularly useful. Each HS has a unique grading system and average GPA. At some schools a 4.0 would put you in the top 1% in class rank, and in others it would only be in the to 20%. Without the Naviance data it is hard to make the correlation between your HS’s GPA and acceptance chances for a specific college.</p>
<p>You can also detect colleges where your HS seems to do better than might be expected and colleges where they seem to do worse than might be expected – though you need to have a good number of apps to have much confidence that the acceptance rates are truly different than the college’s overall acceptance rate.</p>
<p>One more thing to note (as pointed out to me by someone else on CC)…the college lookup function will allow you to see stats for EA/ED acceptances which may not necessarily be delineated on the scattergrams. But, yes, this is only as good as the input received…and sometimes there are few data points for smallish high schools…</p>
<p>Roger all that. I must say I’m excited about the prospect of seeing dozens of plots with green, blue, and red dots. (No, really. I’m kind of a math nerd.)</p>
<p>Getting Naviance to be meaningful for the small LAC 300 miles away is definitely a problem. At our school you need 5 points to produce a scatterplot, but if 4 kids got in and one didn’t (or the reverse) it won’t display.</p>
<p>Our Naviance has another feature where you can list the colleges you are considering. It has a 'compare me" function that I’ve actually found quite useful because it shows stats regardless of numbers or percent acceptance.</p>
<p>Naviance is also the way our GCs communicate with parents and kids. It has info on college nights, her transcript, test dates etc.</p>
<p>Seconding everything about patterns being more important than outliers; sufficient data for your school being a necessity; and grains of salt being vital. </p>
<p>But I think the point made by dadx3 and others bears repeating: a well supplied, well configured Naviance program does offer you some insight into what no CC reading, no guidebooks, no PTA rumors, or anything else can: How colleges view the rigor of the curriculum at your school or, more generally speaking, how they look at graduates from your school. </p>
<p>Another good thing to ponder here, if the Naviance data is showing you a lot of kids with great scores/GPAs not getting in to more selective schools: What does your school’s official School Profile look like? Maybe someone needs to review it.</p>
<p>The Naviance data looks at accepted students. It would be helpful to see the scattergrams for enrolled students. </p>
<p>The “average” accepted data may be meaningless. Some of the high end “outliers” are clearly students who may be using a particular school as a Safety.</p>
<p>It isn’t meaningless if there’s enough data. Example: it’s much harder to get into Tufts where we are because our school sends in 70+ applications a year. The yield to Tufts is low because most of the applicants are using it as a backup but the data means Tufts isn’t a sensible reach for anyone here who isn’t a special category.</p>
<p>I have found Naviance very helpful, but one thing that would be nice is if they used weighted and unweighted GPAs. It’s kind of hard to tell how rigorous the curriculum was for some students and how they did getting into schools because they use unweighted GPAs.</p>
<p>Our school plots the weighted GPAs, so it takes into account the difficulty of the curriculum. I usually lower my son’s GPA a little because it includes two music courses, which probably inflates his GPA a bit. I think Naviance is most useful to see how colleges judge the GPAs at your school. </p>
<p>However there is a wealth of other fascinating information. If I use the college lookup, for example, we have a snippet from the Fiske guide, some links to CC posts about the college, a link to both the scattergram and a chart that has high and low acceptance numbers broken down by early and regular decision. I can see how many people applied also see how many students were accepted by year broken down by year, and you can look up overlaps to see where other kids from your school applied as well as that school. It’s really an amazing resource if you poke around a bit.</p>
<p>OUr school uses weighted, BUT that still doesn’t help because Honors and AP are weighted the same but the course load is very different. Also, AP psych and Human Geo are considered easy but are weighted the same as MV calculus (as an example). Still, I think it’s the best resource out there because it is school-specific.</p>
I love this chart. Compared to the scattergram, it’s a less graphically immediate but more detail-rich picture of the context in which your kid’s application will be read. For reaches, I love the column showing the lowest GPA and scores admitted from your school. Yes, I know that may be dangerously misleading because we don’t know what kind of hooks or distinctions those kids had going for them, but it’s still encouraging to look at–for instance, at one pretty high reach, the lowest GPA admitted last year is only .1 higher than my son’s, and he could easily bridge that gap and then some by midyear. The motivational value of information like that is priceless.</p>