My school uses Naviance and makes scattergrams available for acceptance/rejection decisions based on GPA and SAT/ACT scores. Not sure it this is the case for all of you who use Naviance.
My question is this: If you pick a particular college’s scattergram, it gives several pieces of data. It gives the total number of applications, and then it plots points on the scattergram with admission decisions. But for all schools, the number of plotted points is very significantly less than the number of applications. Here are actual examples: College A: total applications 48, total number of points on the SAT scattergram 12, total number of points on the ACT scattergram 3. So, total of 15 admissions decisions but 48 applications to the school. School B: total applications 56, total number of points on the SAT scattergram 20, total number of points on the ACT scattergram 13. In each case the number of reported admissions decisions is much less than the total number of applications.
Why do you think this is? Our school admission counselors have no idea. And it makes me completely call into question the validity of the scattergram data (especially the average GPA and SAT/ACT of admitted students).
Some schools only input the data from the last 5 years. That’s what I’ve been told. It keeps the data more relevant. Not sure if that’s the case in your data. Maybe in Naviance the default is set to have only results from the last 5 years show, I’m not sure.
If I were to guess, your school is not doing a great job of collecting outcomes although it IS capturing all the data for applications. At most schools, GCs will know where a student applied because he/she will have been involved in the process. But decisions are sent solely to the students, so if the students don’t report their outcomes to the GC, they don’t know.
There is a category for applications that are withdrawn (i.e., I applied ED2 to 1 school and RD to 10 and got into the ED2 school so withdrew 10 applications without decisions) but honestly, the amount of missing data sounds too big to be accounted for by that only.
I’d guess that the data that is there is correct BUT that there’s a lot of missing data. But that’s just my guess.
There was a thread somewhere on CC earlier in which people were talking about Naviance, and one of the things that came out of it was that 1), there seem to be different levels of “robustness” that a school can purchase and 2) for each school, it’s only as good as the data that goes into it, and it’s up to the school to manage data input. I know that our school is very diligent about its database, but the college counselors only have about 25-30 students each and really pride themselves on understanding the admissions landscape, and this is an important tool for them (as well as students and parents.)
But one would think that since all the data is on the same scattergram page it would be from the same time period, so the number of acceptances plus the number of rejections plus the number of unresolved waitlist should equal the number of applications. Is this pattern true on your Naviance as well?
There is no one answer that will fit every HS. I am shocked that the admissions counselor doesn’t know the answer. Can you ask him/her to get an explanation? Perhaps the head of guidance knows?
@Parsoc, the data is collected at different times. When the accounts are set up, the scores and GPA go it. If you do you applications through Naviance (or even if you don’t), that data is all entered by Feb. So all those applications would be in. It is only LATER, when decisions come in, that the outcomes are reported. For it to be on the scattergram, the data set has to be complete – in other words, it needs to have an outcome associated with it. That’s why the numbers in the table and points on the scattergram don’t match. Does that make sense?
Put differently, if I apply to a school, it’ll get counted as an application. But only if I provide a decision will the data set be complete and show up on the scattergram.
As an aside, even at schools that are diligent about this, decisions from WL are often missed unless the student enrolls there because so many students have already made final decisions at that point that nobody is paying a lot of attention.
Yes I guess that makes sense @gardenstategal. And I also guess that if admissions are self-reported then acceptances are far, far more likely to be reported than rejections, so the GPA and SAT/ACT averages are probably not far off. Unless, as you suggest, that waitlisted students are systematically underreporting their eventual acceptances. If so, this would lead to GPA and SAT averages that are incorrectly high. But probably not by much. Thanks!
@parsoc - You can ask the GC for a pdf of outcomes you are interested in. In my experience the printed output seems to be more complete than the website and/or the scattergrams. I would send an email to our GC of the criteria such as GPA > 85 AND (SAT > 1300 OR ACT > 33) etc… and he/she emailed me a pdf with all of the data. You can then insert the pdf into Excel for analysis.
At my Ds HS the scattergrams are for all of the High schools in the district but the chart with the accepted/enrolled numbers are only for her her high school. The GC told parents at an information night that the graph shows a larger number and gives more data points. Not sure if it is just our district or if this is what happens other places.
For example - Alabama has 15-20 data points on the graph but only 4 have applied/accepted from her high school in the past 3 years and none have attended. The others are from others in our district at the other district HS.
Naviance seems customizable to different schools so YMMV