<p>payfor, sounds like we have the same kid. Similar grades and scores. American looks very safe on our scattergrams. No one with SAT scores over 1300 was rejected, and only a handful (with low scores) were rejected with a weighted GPA of 90 or above.</p>
<p>“Love thy safety.”</p>
<p>That’s great advice!
I’ve gotta remember that one. :)</p>
<p>Alright, so how would you use Naviance to gauge safeties? If every child who ever applied from your school was accepted and half of those had scores and/or grades below yours, would you consider that a safety despite not being in the top 25%? I would.</p>
<p>^
I would tend to agree, Queens Mom. If there is a large sample size, I think the data from your own school carries a lot of weight.</p>
<p>I would Queen’s Mom. I think some on this board were telling me American wasn’t a safety on another thread, but looking at our Naviance data, I’m pretty convinced that it is. They just don’t reject kids with my son’s SAT scores.</p>
<p>Yeah, mathmom, our kids have similar stats. I remember you started a thread for B+ students taking APs and I felt right at home.</p>
<p>American looks like a safety from our Naviance data also.</p>
<p>I do plan to cut down the long (60+) list of colleges down to about 20 over the next few weeks, and categorize them safety/match/reach. Then, I will show him the lists, starting with safeties, and he can decide if he wishes to pursue further.</p>
<p>Two of the reasons I have such a long list are:
- DS is very open and undecided about location, size, major, etc. Although I screened out some colleges that were too small (<1500) and too large (>20,000), he continues to insist that it doesnt matter to him.
- I searched for colleges that might offer merit money for high scoring Hispanic students, since DS will likely qualify for both NHRP and NMSF. Auburn, for example, would never be on DSs radar screen, but I learned something about a full ride for NHRP recipients so I will check it out.</p>
<p>DS did compile his own list of 11 colleges, but some of them were selected based on where some of his classmates are applying and I have serious doubts about how well they fit him. For example, I dont think hes a Johns Hopkins type of student. And I dont think a huge school like Univ. of Washington, another on his list, would be such a good fit for him. These are my assumptions, of course, and I am open to learning more about these schools.</p>
<p>DS is not the CC-type, but he found mychances dot net about a month ago and he likes that site. Apparently, some kids from his school have been using it. I looked at it, and I found it to be helpful.</p>
<p>I looked at that site w/S2’s numbers, and some of the chances that he’d get in seem way, way out of whack to me. Maybe I’m a pessimist!</p>
<p>When looking at your school’s Naviance it might be helpful to know how many years of data are included. Admissions standards for many colleges have increased in the past few years, so kids that were admitted 4-5 years ago make not have the stats that would get them in today. Something to keep in mind.</p>
<p>Our school has two sets of Naviance charts – one with the old 1600 scale (2000-2006) and one with the 2400 scale. It’s a lot more helpful, in that we can see how current applicants did in the process. I have to say, though, even with the data split out, at least at both my kids’s schools, the GPA/SAT level of accepted kids and % accepted has remained remarkably consistent.</p>
<p>CountingDown, I guess I’m a pessimist too–just don’t want DS disappointed.</p>
<p>Is anyone familiar with a website that calculates chances? I realize they don’t have a lot of data, but they seem, on the whole, to be very accurate in both their computer-generated chances and their community-generated chances. Do you think it’s useful?</p>
<p>Mychances dot net does that kind of prediction. Just seemed awfully optimistic to me.</p>
<p>That’s exactly the site I was referring to, CountDown. Yeah, it seems optimistic to me too, and yet if those accuracy rates are to be believed… Maybe fewer rejected applicants report back so the numbers are skewed toward acceptance?</p>
<p>Our Naviance does not include any data prior to 2003 (2003-2008, with 2009 set to come online sometime this summer), so I think that is fairly applicable to next year.</p>
<p>For example, Goucher (which I consider a safety for D even though her scores are below the 75%ile) seems to have a 3.0/1150 cutoff for the school and everyone else gets in.</p>
<p>What happened to that B+ with APs thread anyway? Of course my D’s SATs are horrible, so I am not sure on what thread I actually belong.</p>
<p>collegedata.com also does chances, but they use a pretty crude scale; for instance, according to them, our son is about equally likely to get into Harvard, BU and UMass Amherst! Not useful, to put it mildly.</p>
<p>Our school’s Naviance scattergrams appear to use only this year’s stats; I can’t even seem to find an option to see previous years (maybe the database only has this year’s data? I think it’s a pretty new service for us). And since this year is the toughest in memory, that makes the scattergrams really useful. I figure if a college looks like a safety based on the class of 2009, it’s probably a safety.</p>
<p>If you are at a small HS make sure to enlist your GC’s help in interpreting the scattergram data, since some colleges may have so few applicants from your school that numbers are unusable. i.e. 5 kids applied to Dartmouth in the last 2 years. 4 accepted. kid who was rejected had higher scores and grades than the 4 accepted. Of the 4, 2 were legacies, one a regionally noted french horn player, one the daughter of a United States Senator.</p>
<p>So the Dartmouth stats are not just unhelpful. They are less than helpful, unless your kid is a legacy, award winning musician, or you are a prominent national figure. In which case, go ahead and look at the stats.</p>
<p>In my kids HS nobody has ever been rejected from Cal Tech (at least since they were keeping track). But that’s because the “Cal Tech types” usually apply to MIT early (East coast bias) and once in, don’t often apply anywhere else (a couple of kids have done RD apps to Princeton if they’re leaning towards studying engineering in a more bucolic location than Cambridge). And the borderline Cal Tech types can usually get talked into applying to Cornell or Penn Engineering (closer, less intense, easier to switch to Arts and sciences if you change your mind.) So the few kids who end up applying to Cal Tech have both self-selected, and have made an affirmative choice that they don’t want any of the other close by options. And the high school places a huge premium on being able to articulate “Why college X” which weeds out the kids who couldn’t get accepted or shouldn’t get accepted.</p>
<p>So don’t look at our 100% accept rate to Cal Tech and extrapolate anything from it. YMMV.</p>
<p>I think that as a starting point for naviance, you want a decent sample size. One of the schools D is interested in had 5 kids apply during the past 3 years. All of them got in - however since the sample is so small, the data is almost meaningless. However, if during the past 3 years 50 kids applied to a college and all of them over some threshold got in, then I think you can rely on that data and assume safety.</p>
<p>Our Naviance won’t even show some scattergrams of low volume colleges to protect the privacy of the applicants.</p>
<p>5 kids is the minimum for D’s naviance to show graph.</p>
<p>In terms of good websites for calculating chances, I agree that Mychances dot net can be useful. The chances can be a bit optimistic, but the most useful thing I’ve noticed about it is that one can create a public profile and ask other users for chances. Now, it’s uncertain how realistic these chances are, but it certainly helps one get a perspective from other humans rather than solely a computer.</p>