<p>For S2 – the future college math professor – the Naviance scattergrams were dead-on. He applied primarily to top schools that are heavily stats-oriented and for which his high school had lots of data (many students applying each year).</p>
<p>For S1 – the funky, creative, artsy one – Naviance was of no use whatsoever because portfolio review was a major component of the admissions decision at his schools (RISD, CMU School of Design, etc.). There’s just no way to incorporate that into a graph based on GPA and SAT scores.</p>
<p>Re UChicago: I don’t think you are wrong that Chicago has fewer legacies and recruited athletes than Princeton or Dartmouth, or that it pays more attention to numbers than is commonly supposed. I’m not so sure about URMs – Chicago would almost certainly love to have more of them, and does admit quite a few. I suspect the main Naviance difference between Chicago and Princeton/Dartmouth, however, is the fact that during the period covered by Naviance charts Chicago probably admitted close to 35% of its applicants, while Princeton and Dartmouth were less than half of that. The more students a college admits, the less random its admissions are going to seem.</p>
<p>I think if you look at the UChicago results on CC this year, where the RD acceptance rate is likely to be in the mid-teens, you will see a lot more randomness (vis a vis test scores and grades) than in the past.</p>