<p>OK, I KNOW this is a stupid question, but this is one of those things I just can't figure out. Can any of you smart CC parents PLEASE tell me what the heck is this naviance?? I just don't get it. I gather it is some type of software program to help with college placement, but I can't figure it out. Is it for students? Or counselors? What info does it provide? Do any of you CC parents use it? Is it good? What exactly is the purpose of it? Yes, I went to the website, but I still can't figure it out. Can someone please explain it to me? Thanks.... Sorry to be so dense. Normally I am good at this type of thing, but this has me stumped.</p>
<p>I'm a student, but I can help you out. Naviance is basically a web application that displays student status and provides charts, matchups, and comparisons of colleges vs. each other or vs. your given data, including test scores and GPA. However, the data is school specific, so you can see what kind of grades/test scores got students from your particular school into a particular university/college. It is quite helpful to me due to being much less generic than those chance websites that just give you an answer based on numbers; Naviance puts your school's rigor and specific reputation into perspective with your grades and gives you a better idea of whether or not you have a shot at a particular school.</p>
<p>It's a web-based program that your school subscribes to. You can subscribe at different levels. Super-deluxe includes a class master-scheduling program for administrators, but most schools just buy the counseling suite. That includes a communication tool, where you can send out targeted e-mails. The best thing, however, is the school-specific database that enables you to see how your child's stats compare to other kids from YOUR school in terms of college acceptance. In other words, if your kid has a 4.0, 2200 SAT, you can see whether that was good enough for other kids from your particular school to gain admittance to a specific college. </p>
<p>Does that make sense?</p>
<p>School counseling departments lease the program. I assume it's both useful for them and for us. The best thing about it from our point of view is that the school inputs the last several years of acceptance history into a data base and it's all plotted on easy to read graphs. So I can read that 35 kids from our school applied to RPI, 11 were accepted, with an average SAT of <em>_, average GPA of _</em> (using our whacky grading system) and not only that, but I can see a little green dot or a red x or a blue diamond showing me scores for accepted, rejected and weightlisted students for every school. For some school acceptance rates are better than national averages (Harvard suprisingly among them). For some schools you can see every student with scores and grades above a certain quadrant are accepted, making it easy to identify likely safeties.</p>
<p>Right - as Youdon'tsay and mathmom point out, it's particular to your child's school. The information it offers is similar to the stats online and in all the college guidebooks, except that Naviance takes into account what colleges know about the rigor of your school and its curriculum.
The longer your school has had it, the more useful a tool it is.</p>
<p>xposted with mathmom.</p>
<p>Naviance is a bust for Happykid because there is no way to search for her specific major field. But then again, most of the other search engines I've looked at are no good for that specific major field either.</p>
<p>Be careful, neighbor kid was sure he had no shot at a few of his choice schools because a very few recent grads with extremely high stats had applied to, and were accepted to, those same schools. Eventually the GC explained it was only based on apps from his hs, and not the actual stats of the college. He applied, was accepted and is now enrolled in a school that Naviance said he had no chance at.</p>
<p>Usually if your school has Naviance they will supply students and parents with a password and instructions for use. The program is used by both counselors and students.</p>
<p>It has its uses for administrators as well but the feature you'll find the most useful is that you can look up individual colleges where you'll find "scattergram" graphs that plot SAT scores on one axis and GPA on the other. Students from up to the last five years (or however long your school has been using) will be represented by shapes and colors that stand for accepted, rejected, waitlisted etc. It's a useful tool, but you have to keep in mind that it doesn't tell you if someone is a recruited athlete, a developmental candidate, or has some other kind of hook. Also, year by year changes in acceptance rates are not reflected - five years can be a long time in college admissions and things can change.</p>
<p>Still, patterns by the stats can sometimes be surprisingly easy to interpret. We didn't have Naviance when my kids applied, but I had access to similar records that were kept by the school. I learned that our HS mostly got kids into one particular school when they applied there early. Another school had a strong and consistent relationship with our HS. Some colleges seemed to lean more toward GPA and others more heavily favored the SAT. Some colleges had a significant number of acceptances of students with outlying stats - others had zero. There were some really interesting revelations. I pretty much found it to be the most revealing information I had in the process.</p>
<p>Oooohhhh. Now I get it!! Thanks for explaining CC posters. Wow, that really sounds like something I should look into. I just found out our school has it. Why couldn't Darling Son or Darling Counselor explain that to me???? I better get on that immediately.</p>
<p>well, thanks for the info. I got the password from my son (amazing what he knows when I hold his feet to the fire) and logged on. I just spent the past hour looking up the top 10 or so schools on the scattergram. All I can say now is that I am going to log off and start drinking heavily. Thanks !!!</p>
<p>Now try looking for the next layer of data...there are some great schools on the opposite coast from where we live that only a handful of students (or even no students last year) applied to from our high school. I view that as potential.</p>
<p>Naviance is owned by Hobsons, which also owns College View. The college information on Naviance is the same as on College View. FYI, Hobsons also owns CC.</p>
<p>Not very helpful for my D (even if she COULD find her password), because her class of 89 students was the first to use it.</p>
<p>When our school instituted it, they put in data from the two classes previous.</p>
<p>That's a good idea. Maybe her school did too. Would have added another 100 data points! Roll out didn't seem to go well, but maybe that was up to D. I was pretty disappointed after reading about it here. Oh well, turned out fine.</p>
<p>Our GCs can tell how long parents spend logged into Naviance...</p>
<p>I think the scattergrams are great...you do have to keep in mind they don't show minority or athlete status or if a kid has some cool extracurricular activity or alumni/faculty parent. And if they go back more than a few years they might not be as useful since admissions has been uber-competitive the last two years.</p>
<p>I don't see scattergrams on naviance. is it possible that ours doesn't have that option?</p>
<p>Even though my daughter graduated last June, I just went on her high school Naviance to search for some scholarships she can still apply to in our area</p>
<p>My d's was also the first class to have access to Naviance at her school. Data was input for the previous year's class, as well. Because there were so few data points, it wasn't as helpful for her class as it will be for succeeding years. Only 4 kids, including my d, applied to her favorite school in those 2 years, so we couldn't really adjust expectations based on the Naviance stats.</p>
<p>Another byproduct of having so few datapoints - the system's not as confidential as it's supposed to be. Of those 4 kids, only one (mine) applied ED. She was accepted. If you knew that, you'd know her SATs and GPA, because Naviance reports "lowest accepted ED SAT/GPA." My d didn't think it was a big deal. However, a classmate of hers who received a well-publicized local award with a self-reported 93 GPA actually had an 89 average instead, which some skeptical folks confirmed on Naviance. So people should be aware that the system's not as private as they may think.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I don't see scattergrams on naviance. is it possible that ours doesn't have that option?
[/quote]
Scattergrams are a valuable tool - I'd hope they're not optional. Have you looked on the left side of your screen, under the "About College" heading? They're about half-way down, under "college compare."</p>
<p>frazzled, some schools do not offer scattergrams. They seem to be optional. Our school just got Naviance last year. I don't think anything is plotted and I don't know how to even get on it. They did not give us the password for it. I am relying on some scattergrams from other high schools to help.</p>