@doschicos - your school uses 3 years of data. Ours has 5. I suggest it’s a factor of class size. With only 70 graduates per year and a desire to maintain anonymity, there are still several colleges that we have no scattergrams for.
Right… they won’t show data if it would make it too easy to recognize the student in question.
Also, I’m fairly sure that there are different packages that schools can purchase; not everyone will necessarily have access to the same type of information.
Schools can set up Naviance differently. For instance, I can’t see the scattergrams, but our counselors have access and do share during meetings. I can see highest, lowest and average scores accepted. It’s a very useful tool, and is even more so when a counselor can provide context.
Thanks @EyeVeee for starting this thread.
@EyeVeee, in your situation we were able to ask the school GC about those schools. They have access to whatever data there is, even though you are blocked from seeing it if the numbers are small. She didn’t show us the data, but indicated her sense of whether the school was a reach/match/safety based on it.
One of the things that came up in previous Naviance posts is that schools can purchase different packages AND they can use different methods for populating them. Depending on how they do the latter, the info can vary in reliability. At our school, the CCs do the input as they know the kids’ admissions results and they don’t view it simply as a tool for students but as an important tool for them to do their job well. A good database was key! At other schools, admissions results may be self-reported. If you think the info seems unreliable, ask how it is collected.
Personally, I loved Naviance because it reflected the realities for our school, especially for GPA. The CC context always helped, especially on outliers. We had 5 years to protect anonymity but the counselors could add color. And while it’s true that a lot of schools have become more competitive, we also saw situations in which one kid getting in seemed to “crack open” certain schools. So the 5 year results went both ways.
For my S17, Naviance was basically useless. He had the biggest class in the history of the school (252), so once we looked outside the NJ and PA schools, most stats were unavailable because the pool was too small. Even for the state schools, the scattergram was way off because of all the high stay kids who use them as safeties. I don’t think he was in range for any school he applied to and he was accepted everywhere.
@NJWrestlingmom , can you explain why high stats kids using a school as a safety distorts the results? Didn’t it also show the lower stats kids who got in? It would not have made a difference with the set up our school used.
@intparent - In retrospect, you’re probably right, but we didn’t run into a confluence of sincere interest and missing data for either of ours.
I’ve posted this a few times elsewhere: Naviance for us was so-so information. It’s a great location for quick data comparisons of school issued items available anywhere (SAT/$/majors), but our version is so limited that I would never have made a decision based on it. The example is my own Daughter, who after a ~1200+ SAT moved to the ACT and ended up with a 34. If you look at her school now on Naviance, her SAT is published (and looks like she has a serious hook, which she does not), but her ACT doesn’t have enough peers to post. It’s misleading.
@gardenstategal I think the high stats kids can affect the results if you look at the average GPA/ACT score. In our Naviance, they use that average to show whether your student is above or below that average as a data point. If you look at the scattergram, though, it does give better info since you can see the dots of the kids who were accepted below your school’s average.
The issue we have with our Naviance is that, for some LACs, only very high stats kids apply. So, for a place like Grinnell or Kenyon, it looks like only perfect GPAs and near perfect scores get accepted. Those students are above those schools’ 75th percentile. I also know that many of those kids got merit from those two schools so there must be room below these tippy top kids where there would be acceptances but not necessarily merit money. (I only know they got merit bc our GC told me…it’s not on Naviance.)
Actually, @EyeVeee , I hadn’t thought about how students with both an ACT and SAT are reported. I can see how a gap like your D had (which IME is not unusual ) could mess up the stats. An unreported score could definitely be misleading.
@homerdog , I relied on the scattergrams. Agree that the average alone isn’t helpful. Nor are the lowest GPA and lowest test scores, especially because they are rarely in the same kid and there is often a back story.
It is nice to know that some schools are sheltering students’ anonymity. Ours is not. My son has a friend who is attending a certain college. On Naviance, it is shown that one student applied to that school since 2011, was accepted, and is attending. So we now know her GPA and SAT score, as would anyone who looked at that college and knows she is going there! But I cannot complain, or I would have no high school data whatsoever on the majority of colleges at which my son is looking, to which very few students from his high school ever apply.
@TheGreyKing At our school, it looks like they only post data if they have more than three kids’ info. Otherwise, it says “not enough information” and there are no tick marks at all on the scattergram. I’m wondering if our GC would tell me in private, though, if there were kids who applied to schools without scattergrams if we wanted information from those schools. I think they might share the scores without the kids’ names or at the very least communicate to us that S19 is in the ballpark or above or below.
@TheGreyKing@homerdog - Our school only posts if there are enough data points too, but they used to break down ED vs RD, so sometimes you could figure out who an ED kid was because there aren’t as many as those. Don’t think it is broken down that way anymore, but the gc can provide it
Our school allows most of the data to be seen by students and parents. You can see scattergrams that show the exact GPA and test score for each applicant and what their status was between RD, ED, waitlist and accepted or waitlisted and denied, etc. There’s actually about a dozen categories. It obviously doesn’t list the identity of the student and in most cases there are too many data points to figure it out because the scattergram aggregates years of data and the typical kid at this high school applies to many schools.
@gardenstategal as already commented, the scattergram does give a better idea, but when looking for an overview every school we looked at had an average gpa of 94+. The scatter gram would give more detail, but for a lot of schools outside the NJ state schools there weren’t enough applicants to show. Also, we seem to have a lot of very high achievers (especially in my son’s year)), then a large number who do community or trade schools. There are not a lot of lower stat kids applying to 4 year schools, especially outside of a couple of the closer state schools.
Naviance was pretty useless for my daughter, who applied mostly to LACs. To protect privacy, our school will not publish scattergrams for colleges that don’t have a lot of applicants.
@NJWrestlingmom We’re in NJ too. I’m surprised if your school has a lot of very high achievers that there are not more stats for out-of-state schools, though perhaps your overall school population is a lot smaller than ours (~1,500). At ours all the high achievers mostly apply out-of-state since other than Princeton (which takes a lot of our kids), there are no schools in-state that they would consider other than as safeties. So when you take 475 kids who are typically applying to 10 schools (except those who do ED), with all but 1-2 of those being out-of-state, we end up with a good data set for most of the out-of-state LAC’s and more well-known universities. We’ve started looking data data for kid #2 who has specific interest in California and I’ve been surprised how even most of the UC’s, Claremonts and other well-ranked schools there have a decent amount of data points (who would have thought that a NJ public school would have enough applicants to Pepperdine to get good data).