What are your favorite ways to use Naviance? I have been using it for several years but recently noticed something I have not seen before – the year by year stats for admission from my kids’ school (Application History). I know, I know – don’t know how I could have missed it. (Did it possibly appear recently?) I had been focusing on the Graph with the test scores and grades plotted. I also like to click on Overlaps. How about you?
My kids attended a couple of different schools and it seemed like the two schools had different features enabled.One had the application history and the other didn’t. Also, the year after one kid graduated, I could still log onto the site and see her personal info, but could no longer see the scattergrams. Perhaps the counselors can control what is available to whom.
Pay attention to the stats of the kids who didn’t get in ( if kids are your school accurately report this). The plot of rejections at high end schools can be much more informative than the plot of acceptances.
My biggest tip is to remember: garbage in, garbage out. At my kids’ school, several years’ information was clearly incomplete, and probably messed up. So take it with a grain of salt. Also, be aware that the more marks on the scattergram, the more useful the information is. When there are only a few, it’s harder to know if some of the admissions represent hooked applicants.
I agree with Hunt. In looking at my daughter’s Naviance, it only has her SAT score listed. So it looks like she got into some schools with very low stats. I have also noticed that while everyone tends to enter where they applied, they may not be so diligent about updating the information. There are instances where a college may have 3 applications, 0 admittances, 1 enrolled/attending for a specific year.
D2 used the details section for each school on Naviance to determine that for her top choice, she had a miniscule chance to get in RD but an excellent chance to get in ED. We made sure that she did all of her “due diligence” visits on her top choices so that she was in a position to go ED.
If the two people who got into ___ Super-selective U. have unusually low scores - assume that means they had really, really compelling hooks, not that you have a chance.
ClassicRockerDad, is correct that Naviance is a great way to see what kind of scores and grades are good enough for ED and EA. Sometimes there’s a huge difference, sometimes there isn’t.
The statistics are not very helpful for the more popular schools. For example, out of a class of 500, maybe 200 will apply to the state flagship. Included in that group are many students from the top 10%, for whom perhaps the school is a safety. So the mean SAT/ACT and GPA will be skewed upward.
Also, ignore the outliers on the scattergrams. They are athletes or otherwise hooked.
It was helpful because it only had 2 previous years. I don’t know if there is a feature to screen out previous outdated years.
Something to consider is whether there is a clearly defined border between admits and rejects.
If it is not clearly defined, then the school’s admission criteria may give significant weight to non-stat criteria that do not correlate well to stats, and/or there are multiple admission buckets of different selectivity at the school (commonly division or major).
Even if there is a clearly defined border, there can still be a trap in that none of the previous admits applied to the more selective bucket that you are applying to.
Also Naviance in the “About me” section has a place to put all of your ECs and awards and volunteering, etc. This is great to keep updated because you can use it to create resumes for job or scholarships and also is useful when doing your college app.
Thanks for the suggestions! Very helpful! I know ours has some mistakes because of how my older son’s stats got recorded, but I hope the big picture is still valid to some degree.
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