<p>My high school senior has finished his applications, and has already been accepted at two of the schools to which he applied. But when we go to Naviance, it has not been updated. It is SO far behind, it shows application sent to only one of the 8 schools on the list. No acceptances, no other updated info.</p>
<p>I asked the GC what was up with Naviance. WE can’t update it. GC can’t update it. GC says the updating happens “automatically.” If that is the case, Naviance is pretty useless. We only found it useful very early in the process, when our kid was first considering schools. It was helpful to compare our student’s test scores/GPA on the Naviance graph with others from previous years, and see which schools accepted kids with similar scores. But now…what good is it? Or is it just that our GC is dropping the ball somewhere?</p>
<p>I’m also interested in the “nuts and bolts” of operating Naviance. According to the HS website our local public has had Naviance for several years. Yet I’ve not encountered one student who’s actually signed onto it. And it’s a dead link on the webpage. My hypothesis is that the HS purchased the software in order to ease the(ir) process of sending out transcripts and LORs. Is that hypothesis too harsh? Is the process really automatic? Does Naviance automatically upload transcripts from the HS computer systems? Are LORs addressed to specific colleges, or are they a generic “To Whom This May Concern?” Who updates the system with Acceptances, Rejections, Waitlists, etc. How does Naviance handle ED, EA and SCEA? If a student is admitted ED does Naviance automatically send Withdrawal Notices to the other colleges a student has applied to?</p>
<p>Like many software packages, I think Naviance is configurable (by the school) to do a variety of things. It may be possible for schools to buy different modules/tools from Naviance, so what one school offers may not match with another.</p>
<p>Our school does the following with Naviance:
Allows parents and students to maintain a list of colleges the student is interested in. Either parent or student can log in and add colleges to the list, but only students can delete colleges.
When you click through the college name, it provides a variety of info on the college. My kid’s test scores and GPA are in the system (somehow from the school, we do not enter that). When we look at a specific school, we can see my kid’s scores & GPA compared to other kids from our school who have been admitted to the same college.
There is a graph function that shows a dot for every student who has applied in the last 5 years to the college with the result. The dot is graphed against SAT and GPA on the axis. There is then a dot for my kid to show where she falls. The dots for kids accepted have different colors & shapes – I can’t remember the exact details (and they won’t give us access for D2 until January), but something like different symbols for admitted, rejected, waitlisted and eventually attended, waitlisted and eventually rejected. It might show if the acceptance was ED or EA, don’t recall.
There is a profile that kids or parents can update about the student as well. The school also puts all test score results (including ACT, SAT Subject scores, etc) in the profile.
I am pretty sure our school updates all the info manually, but we are pretty small independent school. I suspect there are options to update some things via an automated interface for bigger schools.
There are some college search functions available that we have not used (we have Fiske and CC!) :)</p>
<p>It is certainly possible that a school would purchase Naviance (or some of the functionality) and NOT deploy all the tools that we parents would find most useful.</p>
<p>SJRcalderone, I suspect your GC is not well informed. How could acceptances get updated “automatically”? I am pretty sure that colleges do not feed info into Naviance; it can only get in if your high school takes the info on those students and puts it in. I understand why they would want to control that centrally (can imagine kids fudging acceptance info out of spite or “fun” or whatever). It seems to me that a college with a poor GC to student ratio would have a hard time with Naviance – they don’t even know where everyone is applying, let alone what the results of each acceptance is.</p>
<p>"… acceptances … can only get in if your high school takes the info on those students and puts it in."</p>
<p>Hmm, I’m imagining my D’s (private school) GC being inudated with 1,800 college acceptance/rejection/waitlist letters on April first, while simultaneously fielding dozens of phone calls from parents requesting “special assistance” for students who didn’t get the result they were looking for. Not to mention (though I will anyway) students gaming the system by not submitting anything but acceptance letters. Wouldn’t it be simpler for colleges that receive application info from a Naviance HS to send back the decision using the same communication channel? Just asking …</p>
<p>Both of my kids’ schools have Naviance. It is my understanding that it is a once a year update as well. One thing I have found lacking is that there is not an indicator for athletes or other factors that might give a student an admissions bump.</p>
<p>Naviance does update automatically, in a way… All the info collected during the admission cycle goes public at the end of the school year. Only data from previous admission cycles is available during the year.</p>
<p>“It was helpful to compare our student’s test scores/GPA on the Naviance graph with others from previous years, and see which schools accepted kids with similar scores” - Exactly. </p>
<p>Naviance was very valuable to us, even with only the data from 2 prior hs classes. There are other places on the web with general acceptance info for each college, but having the particular hs data was more useful. It’ still just one datapoint, to be referenced along with other info.</p>
<p>I have actually used Naviance from the high school side of things. I would input each college result - whether it was an acceptance, deferral, etc. into the Naviance database. For the current year - only the GC and people working at the hs with access can see results. It updates August 1 of each year for parents and students to view. So - you won’t see results for the Class of 2012 until August 1. </p>
<p>MD Mom - I agree with you that Naviance has no way to label a particular data point as a “hooked” applicant. That might be very touchy. Maybe not for athletes - but for URMs? I think it is just safe to use Naviance as a rough tool and to assume when you see an admit that is an outlier that it was a hooked applicant.</p>
<p>NewHope33 - results trickle in all year long - it’s really not a deluge on 4/1. In the fall, students would stop by our office and inform us of EA and rolling results - ED results mid-December and so forth. My son’s hs is much larger and they just ask us to email results to them as we get them. Some colleges do send the GC a list in April - summarizing every student who applied and the final outcome.</p>
<p>SJR - enjoyed the comment from the GC about Naviance updating automatically - that’s pretty amusing. I assure you that a person enters each result into the database. If a hs sends out 2000 transcript requests - meaning 2000 applications went out from that high school - than 2000 results need to be entered. Each student has a page on Naviance and it lists every college that they requested a transcript for and how they applied - EA, RD, ED, etc. There is simply a drop down menu for results for each college listed - just a matter of being told the results and selecting the correct response for each college. It might take all of 20 seconds to enter each one. I actually found this to be a very fun part of the job - I loved having the kids come in and tell me their results.</p>
<p>Naviance for my son’s school shows how many students have applied for the current grad class. You have to look under each college’s information to see it.</p>
<p>You are right, Rockvillemom, and we did kind assume that the admits on the edge had some type of edge, so to speak. </p>
<p>At my daughter’s school, the kids had to bring in the acceptance letter, so that kept the input accurate. I have not heard the policy for my son’s school yet.</p>
<p>reeinaz - the Naviance administrator(s) at every high school can adjust the privacy settings to control what is displayed and when. Many high schools choose not to show current year activity in order to respect student’s privacy and to lessen parental drama.</p>
<p>I’ve found Naviance very useful. The general stats that it includes that are available everywhere - average gpa and test scores, for example, are one tool. But the scatter plots showing what gpas and test scores from OUR school were usually very different, as ours is known as a very competitive public HS. So a college that accepts an average gpa of 3.75 might have an average acceptance gpa of 3.25 from our HS. That was good info to have, because some colleges didn’t give our HS as much weight as others.</p>
<p>My S’s 3.0 might have discouraged him from trying for some colleges but looking at Naviance stats form our high school, he sometimes found he was right in the accepted group’s stats.</p>
<p>My D’s school large (enrollment over 3,500) uses Naviance as a clearinghouse for all college application materials. So, for instance, kids and parents fill out surveys to help the guidance counselors know enough to write a credible recommendation letter and all school forms are sent to the Common App by virtue of a link between the two sites. As mentioned by others, students can see aggregate data on how they compare with others who are interested in the same schools. You wouldn’t want to base a college search plan on this entirely but it’s a useful weapon for the arsenal. There are other ways to see, in general, the kind of students a school takes. But it’s useful to get a more specific sense of where people from your school are applying and getting accepted. Our Naviance has started linking to College Confidential fairly recently.</p>
<p>In order to protect the privacy of individual students such information is not shown on Naviance. In fact if there are less than 5 students that have ever applied to a school, the data is not shown in the scattergrams at our high school. However, one can make some reasonable assumptions based on the outliers. If you are in the middle of the cluster or towards the outer end, you stand a much better chance. Obviously you cannot compare yourself to the 3.4 gpa/1800 SAT who got into Stanford.</p>
<p>Our school makes all the kids use Naviance to request recommendations, counselor forms, and link to the common app so it is heavily used. My frustration is with the scatterplots. Our HS is small so if a college had less than about 6 applications, the scatterplot is disabled to “protect student privacy.” </p>
<p>I really have no idea which student had a 2100 and a 3.9 gpa last year and was applying to X…</p>
<p>I find Naviance to be tremendously helpful, but I have a couple of questions:</p>
<p>1) Are SAT/ACT scores super-scored, or are they the best sitting for a given student? (or is the definition of what is posted up to the individual high school?)</p>
<p>2) Likewise for GPA, it is clearly the weighted GPA at our HS, but is it the final GPA for students after their junior year, is it updated after the senior year is completed, is it academic only or does it include PE, etc. (or again, are these parameters totally up to a given HS?</p>
<p>Depending on what data is shown on Naviance, the interpretation of the results would vary quite a bit. </p>
<p>For my D’s high school, it seems to be the SAT score each college would have used for the result given on the graph. So, if the particular college superscores, the plot on that college’s graph is the superscore for the student at the time the student applied. The GPA is the school’s weighted GPA at the time the student’s application was considered by the college.</p>