At my D20 school you need to request a midyear report to be sent from the GC.
We donât have Naviance at our high school. CC was the first I had ever heard of it.
I agree it makes no sense to not allow self reporting of grades and scores. Itâs just additional work and expense and theyâre going to get the final transcripts anyhow, so nobody is going to get away with anything. We paid to have test scores sent to a couple schools that are now off the list so that was money down the drain.
Our HS uses Naviance and we just found out midyear reports are sent to all automatically. DS emailed his GC to let her know which schools heâs been accepted to and which ones heâs formally withdrawn from so she would know not to send to those, but she said itâs automatic anyways so they will still get them.
@SoccaMomma I would definitely check with the counseling/ post-grad office to confirm, especially if you donât see mid-year grades showing received in the portal. In our large, public high school, Naviance and CommonApp are connected and the post-grad team is on top of everything. But as a policy, they only send mid-year grades when requested by the student. (We almost missed this by assuming they would be sent automatically.)
@cshell2 If your son/daughterâs GC doesnât know where he/she is applying, who sends the school report, counselor rec letter, and midyear reports?
@mom2jgd - DS applied himself on the college websites. Anything they said he needed he requested the school send, but like I said, none required mid-year reports and none required a LOR from the counselor either. There were two that wanted official transcripts and test scores, the rest were all self-reported. I have no idea what a school report is, but when he applied they asked for his high school name and it came up on the search box when he typed it in, so Iâm guessing they just have access to all of those?
I am a homeschooling parent, so I get to see the GC part of the common application. The GC uploads the semester grades into common app, and the very same info is available to all colleges the student applied to. GC has no say which schools will get to see it and which will not. S20 had a few schools that required the report and a few that didnât. Yet, they all downloaded the updated transcript (you get to see when each school downloads any document).
Our HS uses Scribbles to send transcripts⊠this is the first year. We sent 8 mid year reports - they are NOT sent automatically and they are NOT connected to the common app. So of the 8 schools - 3 show as received, 2 show nothing - not missing, not received, just nothing at all about a mid-year report and 3 show as missing.
We can send the report as a PDF but not sure why the schools arenât pulling it down from the Scribbles system, they were all notified⊠trying to figure out how to navigate this change in process that doesnât seem to be working well.
@mathKids wrote
yes - that is correct. Even the university that rejected DS in the ED round downloaded - guess its automatic on the university side as well. Universities that require may look into them while others just ignore.
@cshell2 The school report is completed by the counselor⊠it includes a rec letter and information about how the student compares to his or her classmates and in the context of their specific school, basically. Itâs how colleges and universities assess rigor (which is ranked as âvery importantâ in admissions on many common data sets).
Sounds like your son was able to bypass this step based on his choices but Iâm sure the GCâs at his school are well aware of the application lists of other students in his class.
I donât know, maybe. Iâm sure there are some kids that work closely with the counselor that are applying to the more elite schools, but Itâs a small private school and I think a lot of the students and parents handle most of the college application stuff themselves. Thatâs what I get from talking to other parents and from hearing from DS about what his friends are doing. The vast majority are applying to Midwest state schools and you donât really need a lot of hand holding to apply to the likes of UMN or Iowa State. The counseling office (one woman) has never contacted us about anything college related, outside of having an information session they hold every Fall about steps you should be taking every year. He got in everywhere he applied and with scholarships at most of them, so I donât know what more they could have really done to help.
@mom2jgd Yeah, this as usual is a case of âit dependsâ. A large number of schools handle applications exactly as @cshell2 describes. HSs have been doing this forever, and parents donât need to get as involved as most of CC parents tend to do. There are portals at most schools that will indicate if something is missing, so that is pretty helpful.
Also, I believe the student needs to fill out the Counselor information when using the Common App. They are then asked to fill out/submit a school report from what I remember my D17âs counselor saying a few years back. There may be communication between schools and @cshell2 kidâs counselor that she doesnât know anything about.
With D20 this time around I worried less about all the machinations that take place in the background, and just let things play out. Guess what? Same results as with D17.
@cshell itâs not hand-holding and itâs not for students applying to elite schools or those who are working closely with the GC. Itâs just a required part of most college applications (Coalition and Common App included) and itâs a part of the GCâs job description.
@bigmacbeth, youâre correct that itâs part of the âmachinations that take place in the background.â It is a part of the process that parents arenât involved with. Here is a blog post that shows some of the questions on a school report.
https://signeteducation.com/blog/school-reports-what-they-are-and-why-they-matter
I often think about this when I hear shocked parents of âvaledictoriansâ who donât get in to any of the selective schools theyâve applied to. Rigor matters a lot and I donât think students/parents understand that they are evaluated in the context of their high school, not just in the larger pool of applicants.
And of course none of this matters to @cshell2 son who has done very well despite involvement from his GC. Kudos to him!
@mom2jgd Then those are not CC students/parents. 
@mom2jgd - All Iâm saying is if we didnât apply for schools on our own, it wouldnât get done. Our high school does not meet individually with students and work on their applications with them. You can request to meet, but itâs not something that is just automatically going on as part of their Jr/Sr year. We applied on portals, the colleges tell us if we need anything else and thatâs it. From what I see googling the school report, it is sent along with the transcript which most of the schools arenât asking for until heâs done so I guess theyâll get it then. We didnât use the Common App as only 1 school he was applying to was on there, but every application asked what high school he was attending and it had a high school code, so maybe they contact the high school. Nothing ever showed up as missing or pending on our portals though.
A lot of what I read on CC is a little âdifferent worldâ than what Iâm used to. I would say half the kids in DSâs class wonât even leave town and if they go to college will apply to one of the local universities which they will have no problem doing as late as this summer and still get in.
My D20 and I were just having this conversation. Her school does not weight GPAs or have valedictorian, so the counselorâs report can be very important to compare rigor of coursework and estimated class rank. This is the kind of thing that can be explained in the school report from the counselor since it is different than most schools that weight AP and honors classes. Of course it is a piece of her application that we will never see, but we are counting on it to be good! lol
About the format of the school report, mid-year report and even the counsellor recommendation format are all there right on the common app. They basically provide the context to the numbers (not sure how deeply the AOâs look into them).
I think there is a misunderstanding. All kids should be applying for schools on their own. They need to research the school, find out about pre-reqs, application deadlines, write the essays, etc. Some high schools have college info nights or application workshops for local public colleges but for most kids, the bulk of what they do is on their own. Heck, that is why the majority of us are on this board - to research what our kid needs to do.
What @mom2jgd is saying is that most colleges require College Board/ACT scores to be sent to them. The student is responsible for requesting that those agencies send the scores. Most (but not all) colleges require a fall transcript, a mid-year transcript to make sure the kid is on course then a final transcript over the summer. Those transcripts are usually sent by the GC or AP or whomever at your school handles it. The kid needs to go in and let the administrator know what schools to send the transcript to and most colleges want it sent directly from the school rather than from the student. When the administrator sends the transcript, they almost always send it with a school profile and possibly a school report.
At our school, the report is sent when a counselor sends a letter of rec and the school profile is sent with the transcript. The UCs and CSUs donât ask for anything on top of what is self reported other than official SAT/ACT scores.
@lkg4answers - I understand that. But the original question was how could our GC not know what schools we were applying to. A LOT of colleges in this area allow self-reporting of everything and donât require anything but final transcripts. Of 6 schools he had to have one transcript sent so I guess they know we applied to that school.