I ran across a reference to Parchment.com and its “Student Choice College Rankings” on another thread and I am curious.
Is Parchment sort of the same thing as Naviance? Is their data about college choices reliable? I’m guessing that if it is the platform through which students submitted their official transcripts to the colleges, it would be.
Thanks for any information anyone can share.
I have the same question. How accurate are its predictions?
There is some information data there but a lot of the profiles contain self-reported data so take it all with a grain of salt, and pay little attention to the chances it offers.
Parchment used to provide scattergrams with advanced filtering options but they appear to have removed this functionality. My daughter and I found this extremely useful - in her demographic (top grades and scores for top colleges) there seemed to be very few fake profiles. For top colleges, some people had obviously created fake profiles with extremely low test scores and grades, and then claimed to be accepted.
My daughter is now a college freshman - I checked her profile and it shows her applying to a number of colleges she never applied to. She was accepted early, and never bothered to go back to Parchment to update it. I assume this is the case for many of the profiles there.
Parchment is all self reported, and people can say whatever they want. And as @BldrDad said, some people never go back and report. Naviance isn’t perfect, but it is maintained by GCs and they have an interest in getting and making the data correct. Trust Naviance, your GC, and people out here with a lot of experience before you trust Parchment. (Don’t trust the average high school student responding to Chances, though, they really have no idea…) 
Parchment is sort of like a parlour game – entertaining, but not to be taken seriously.
Parchment is useless. I agree with @intparent, if your school has Naviance, then trust these results. I also like to use the Common Dataset for each school if available.
Yes, I rely on my DD’s school’s Naviance for likelihood of admission and scattergrams.
My question was specifically whether the Parchment data on college rankings based on students’ “revealed preference” is reliable:
I would guess yes as an aspirational list but that is abit of a vacuum right?
The answer is no different… there is no statistical rigor in Parchment because the sample is not random and responses can’t be verified in any way. I remember looking at that ranking and finding it interesting – but again, not reliable. I will say that I am not aware of any other ranking that uses that methodology, and that is why I thought it was interesting. But reliable… no. Plus, who cares what school other students picked over another? People spend too much time in the college process looking at other people’s papers… a student’s own finances, academic goals, family situation, preference for fit, etc. are all that should matter.
@Gumbymom - Parchment has been dumbed down, and I agree it is next to useless now, but a year ago it was very useful - it was possible to restrict the scattergrams to display small subsets of the data (for example - female applicants with SAT between 2300 and 2350, and GPA between 3.95 and 4.0), and then view the user profiles behind each data point. At the schools my daughter and I looked at, most of the profiles and results were clearly legitimate, and what we learned influenced her decision to apply to some top schools to which she otherwise would not have applied - and she’s now attending one of these schools. The biggest issue appeared to be selection bias, as Parchment acceptance rates were far higher than actual rates - interestingly thought, the Parchment acceptance rates closely matched the Naviance acceptance rates at my daughter’s high school.
Naviance was also a useful tool as the data was more accurate and reflected real results from my daughter’s school, but there was no information about the students behind the data, and for schools where there were many past applicants in the same SAT/GPA range, the data points clustered to the point of being unreadable.
My chances for Parchment were wildly off, but that could be due to under reporting on certain schools. One thing I find interesting about Parchment is that students have a vested interest in returning and reporting on their final decision since it’s primarily used as a transcript delivery service. So there may be less incentive to lie than on other sites but it’s still not accurate in any meaningful sense. Just look at a school’s common data set, or [College Navigator](College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics) data if that’s unavailable to see the percent of students accepted and their score range.
Complete GIGO aka Garbage In Garbage Out. Twelve monkeys throwing darts at a percentage chart might be as accurate.
Indeed. The distribution of Parchment users may not mirror the distribution of college applicants across the country (and there does tend to be a home region bias in college selection). Also, kids may take big merit scholarships at a lesser school over a school they would choose if the money was equal (and not all schools offer merit money at the same rate), so the “revealed preferences” ranking is pretty useless.