Naviance revisited

<p>So all our college decisions are in. We're at a well rated CA public HS w/~ 1600 students. Naviance was spot on for each of DS's schools when displayed on the scattergram. How does it play out for everyone else?</p>

<p>I'm not sure about my school, but I think it is accurate for the most part. </p>

<p>My biggest complaint is with good schools like the Ivies and Athletes. I go a school that has a lot of kids go on to play sports in college, some go D1. But some are right up on the cusp athletically and end up at an Ivy league to play sports. I know of at least two at one school, and they skew the data. They were both good students, but their GPA's were like 3.6 weighted, still very good, but those of us without athletic or other types of hooks are most likely not going to get in with a 3.6W. The average GPA for that college from my school was a 4.10, but I think it is skewed. So when I tell people I'm a little skeptical I'll get into that school, they are like, dude your GPA is like .15 higher than the average, and I think it is a little misleading.</p>

<p>Another thing was, one kid got into Princeton from my school in the past 5 years and he had a 3.9W and a 29 ACT, very respectable, but I'm like, what about us normal people, lol. Others were rejected with 4.3+, 34 ACT, etc...</p>

<p>Anyone else find something like this? Well, admissions to a top school is such a crapshoot anyway, I guess it doesn't really matter :)</p>

<p>I have Naviance. So far, it's been somewhat accurate. I got rejected from my 2 far reach schools, accepted at my 2 likely schools, accepted at my 5 match schools, and accepted at 1 reach school (still waiting to hear from the other reach school).</p>

<p>Our Naviance for Harvard has one outlier. You know that person brought something else to the table, URM, Sport most likely. The others all have very high stats and very high grades. I don't think there are enough of them to skew the data. I don't consider a school safe for my kid unless he's in the middle of a sea of green.</p>

<p>For my older son (now a sophomore) Naviance worked fine though there were a couple of schools for which there were very few data points. Carnegie Mellon is a school for which Naviance works less well, the stats for kids going into the School of Fine Arts are quite different from those going into the School of Computer Science.</p>

<p>In my experience Naviance is an extremely good predictor at schools that don't house many legacies, recruited athletes and URMs. </p>

<p>At schools that have many hooked candidates Naviance seem to make no sense at all.</p>

<p>I wish our school had Naviance - we used the sites of comparable schools as a guest and they matched up pretty much, for the two reach schools D did not get into it could have gone either way. Hopefully I can use it again for D2 in a few years...</p>

<p>Naviance was very helpful for the "usual suspects", i.e. schools with lots of applicants. Obviously less so for schools with few applicants, many of which are farther away - although this is where kids should be looking since geographic distribution can weigh in their favor. Also, ACTs are not reported - don't know if this is because not enough kids are taking them (east coast school).</p>

<p>Happykid was given her Naviance code last week and spent half of English class in the computer lab playing with it. She reported that her major field is un-searchable. I expect that this is true for any number of "minority" majors.</p>

<p>Naviance was off for my D at Georgetown. D attends a Catholic school in DC area with many Gtown applicants and she fell comfortably within the range that Gtown has accepted from her school in the past, according to Naviance. At least we thought so. Plus H and I both have grad degrees from there, so we are a bit perplexed that she was waitlisted! I'm guessing they've seen our last alumni donation ;)</p>

<p>We'll have to wait until Tuesday for a final answer to this question, but generally pretty good. I would have given a low probability to Amherst accepting my son based on the Naviance data (they'd accepted under 10% and waitlisted a number of kids near him), whereas Williams seemed, from the data, to be much more likely. They had not rejected a kid from his HS with his stats or better in the three (or five) years and admitted about 20% of those who'd applied. However, Amherst admitted him and Williams waitlisted him. </p>

<p>But, there is a lot of athlete and legacy stuff going on that one can't see from Naviance that caused me to be less optimistic about either. For example, given my son's stats, Naviance says he has between a 40% and 50% chance of getting in to Harvard. But, the four kids he knows who were admitted from his HS to Harvard last year included a double legacy, the star captain of a state championship team, the star captain of the another team (and he thinks legacy), and an immigrant from a not well-to-do family (who is undoubtedly the smartest of the four) and a great violin or cello player (and is not Asian). My son's hook is weaker, if it exists at all. Given that, I'd say the 41% is overly optimistic. We'll see on Tuesday. I don't think that even in a see of green you are safe, mathmom, unless you know about the hooks as well.</p>

<p>My kids are hoooked (urm) and applied to schools where the hooked applicants from our schools don't tend to go. One did much better than Naviance would have predicted and the other worse. Still, it was useful if just to provide a ballpark. The best predictor I found was actually the parents here on cc.</p>

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<p>Are we good predictors because we were pessimistic or optimistic?</p>

<p>"Are we good predictors because we were pessimistic or optimistic?"</p>

<p>LOL! I'm happy to say you were you were more optimistic than the guidance counselor.</p>

<p>2collegewego, do you have any thoughts about why one child did worse than Naviance predicted? Recommendations? Essays? ECs?</p>

<p>For S1 I always thought that his disinterest in writing essays would be a drawback - they were good for him, but especially at Stanford which had different questions he had some really lame essays too.</p>

<p>I created my own Naviance-like grid, due to my daughter's unusual circumstances. She was homeschooled/unschooled and had no grades.
The grid consisted of SAT scores on one access and Subject Test scores on the other. The data came from the previous year's accepted students thread on CC. There were about 100 postings from unhooked applicants. I omitted URMs, legacies and recruited athletes. 13 of 16 applicants with her scores (2350 or higher on both) were admitted. She was, too. The fall-off below 2320 or so was pretty stark.
What surprised me was how predictable the outcomes were without knowing anything about grades or even the schools involved. The main disadvantage to using the CC thread is reporting bias- I'm sure those accepted were more likely to post. On the other hand the patterns were so clear that I believe those who did post were posting accurate information.
The major advantage over Naviance is the ability to cull out URMs, legacies and recruited athletes- about 50% of the student body at this school.</p>

<p>How does Naviance cull out URMs, etc.? Just curious...does one consider outliers to be part of a "hooked" group?</p>

<p>Naviance doesn't cull them out or identify them, to my knowledge.</p>

<p>The University of Chicago, at least by reputation, looks at applicants holistically, values quirky essays, etc. Oddly, the high school Naviance grids I've seen make it appear that U of C admissions decisions are more numbers driven than those of peers. I tend to attribute that to the smaller percentages of legacies, recruited athletes and URMs at Chicago than at peers, say, Princeton or Dartmouth.
Just a hunch.</p>

<p>Sorry, danas, I misread your previous post.</p>

<p>According to our Naviance there were 14 applications to U. of Chicago but there are only 8 points plotted on the graph. One acceptance is over on the left (SAT 1850), four are over on the right (SAT >2200) GPAs (weighted) range from 94 to over 100. The three red x's are in the middle. That's really only one outlier, so it could easily be URM, less likely sports star. There seems to be more give in the GPA (yay!) than other schools, but SAT scores except for the one, are all in the same range.</p>