I was chatting with a friend about naviance as she has a rising senior in our town’s public school. Although my DS is going to be a junior, I’m interested in the information that will become available to me in the future. It seems as though our school simply uses naviance (at least for the students/families) as a means to request and submit transcripts and recommendation requests. Here on CC, I read about treasure troves of information like scatter plots etc. that are immensely helpful in preparing potential lists and predicting success thereafter. So what are we missing? If this is about access and the school deciding not to allow us to see this information, I so can be “that” parent. Or, I wonder if there are subscription level for which our town just doesn’t do.
Schools purchase different levels of service from Naviance so not all schools have the features.
I thought that might be the case @3scoutsmom
Call your high school guidance offer and they should be able to fill you in.
Our district doesn’t use Naviance at all so we had no access. I was always fascinated by all the information others could get from it.
For colleges that admit by division or major, the plots may be less useful unless there is a separate plot for each division or major at the college.
That’s not part of the package that we receive. That would be even more helpful. As an aside, the scattergrams do delineate between EA/ED/RD and Waitlisted/Accepted and Waitlisted/Denied.
I found the scattergrams not very useful as our school only shows the weighted GPA and includes honors and IB classes that the UCs don’t include in the UC GPA. It also includes all classes including PE.
It can also be misleading. I know one student who got into UCLA who scored a 22 on her first ACT, retook for. 30+. But her original score of 22 still shows in the scattergram as “accepted”.
Naviance is useless for estimating chances to top 20 schools because it does not take into account of hooks and other social economical factors. It vastly overestimates the chance of admit for unhooked kids, giving them a false sense of which schools are the reaches, matches and safeties. Of course, it does the opposite for hooked kids.
Many of the low statted students accepted may have had a major hook. Also if a student got a 1200 SAT and a 34 ACT both would show as acceptances while it was the ACT score that got them accepted. Some colleges have increased their selectivity dramatically in the past 5 years: Northeastern and BU to name two. So that someone admitted five years ago would not be admitted today.
Naviance also cannot address the wide socioeconomic disparities between student households in the same school, nor does it reflect legacy privilege, hooks ( athletic recruits, URM vs ORM, etc). Local school districts may decide that these other factors would make the picture too fuzzy to be worthwhile.
In some districts, the picture it paints can still be helpful for many families, so presumably those are the districts that purchase the full blown version.
It seems that there are varying levels of service provided by the site. If you go to the Naviance website, you’ll see there are solutions for different levels of education, and within each of the levels there are tools. There are really 2 'views" or capabilities of the application that appear to be separate.
The system is primarily sold to schools as a way to simplify administration. In looking at the “colleges I’m applying to” page, they have information like application type (ED, RD, etc), application method (Common app, direct), deadlines, status of submissions from the office, the result of the application if known (ie accepted, waitlist). and links to other data.
There is also an area for research. WIthin that section, each school has:
- an overview,
- studies (student faculty ratios, retention and graduation rates, areas of study)
- student life (school size, nearest city, distance from your HS, % living on campus, ethnic diversity, gender, etc.)
- Admissions (SAT/ACT median and ranges, acceptance rate, dates, app fee)
- costs (average net price, % receiving aid, etc)
It’s definitely a resource that saves some time looking up schools, but there isn’t anything on Naviance that you can’t get elsewhere…except the scattergrams.
The scattergrams plot your schools success in applying to various schools. If your school doesn’t have enough applications to maintain anonymity, the chart will appear blank. Our school uses 5 years of data, and it shows the acceptances and rejections plotted on an XY axis with GPA on one axis and test score on another. You can select different tests in a drop down box to rebuild the chart (ACT vs. SAT). If a test doesn’t have a lot of takers, no chart.
The charts have serious limitations and only provide very theoretical guidance. Factors like legacy, URM, ED vs RD, athlete, programs applied for, etc. don’t appear (on ours at least…some say they do see more detail). An example of how they can mislead: my D took the SAT and didn’t do well (~1200?). She switched to the ACT and ended up with a composite 34. Her school doesn’t have enough kids taking the ACT, so no grid appears with her ACT score, yet her acceptance to a highly selective school with a 1200 SAT looks like a very odd / special case. It’s not…just a flaw in the data based on a test score never submitted to anyone.
It’s a good tool for quick research, but all of the data is available on the internet. Sites like niche have summaries…they just don’t have the scattergrams. Those charts are interesting for a quick sense of where your child stands, but never impacted our application decisions.
@TomSrOfBoston ^^^
How do you know my daughter?
I only speak for the three years of stats that is currently loaded for our school, but I don’t see Naviance as useless at all. Sure, it doesn’t have hooks loaded into the database, but you can see someone with lower stats who was accepted and you make an assumption that it was for a hook.
Also, the information of students with hooks, for the most part, is known at the school. We know the sports stars and through the grapevine, you know who’s received big merit aid or a scholarship. These tend not to be secrets. In any case, a green checkmark that’s lower and to the left of the other green checkmarks seems obvious to me that it’s a hook.
As for data not being correct or corrected, well, that can happen with any database. Personally, the HYPSM etc. graphs certainly paint an extremely difficult admittance picture at our school. Nothing rosy there.
No doubt Naviance is an excellent tool beyond the scattergrams, since it also has tracking for apps, scholarships, LOR’s, etc. But it’s not perfect. I think it’s great.
A high school in California that sends most of its college-bound students to UCs and CSUs should:
a. Use UC/CSU weighted-capped GPA for the scatterplots.
b. Where the data points are numerous enough (to avoid privacy issues), report by division or major to the extent that these are subject to different levels of selectivity at each campus.
This is all great information and I appreciate everyone providing the good, bad, and ugly of Naviance. The guidance at our public school is pretty lacking so I feel like I’m on my own with my kiddo. OTOH, it appears that my other child’s boarding school does make use of the full version so that will be an interesting research exercise in a few years!
DDs’ school doesn’t use Naviance either. I’m a data junkie, so I think it would be fun to examine.
@ucbalumnus Agree. The UC GPA would be more informative in naviance. Our administration publicizes only weighted GPA to cloud the scrutiny and GPA disparity in our IB program. Comparing two students with same IB rigor and same grades–one student may have a UC GPA of 4.1 the other 4.3.
What specific differences cause the GPA difference (presumably due to number of courses or which ones count as “honors”)?
Not sure what would cause the weighted GPA to be different in an IB program when two students have the same rigor and grades. But, in the case of my D’s school, there are roughly 550-600 students per class, so with hundreds and hundreds of checkmarks (acceptances) and strikes (rejections), let’s say in the example of UCLA, I’m not sure I/we need any more accuracy than “we’re in the ballgame.” There are lots of cases of students with outstanding stats being rejected and those with lesser stats being accepted.
The checkmarks and strikes in the scattergrams overlap, so I don’t see a point to even greater accuracy of the GPA’s. That .2 difference in the grade on the scattergram with have a lot of both acceptances and rejections at both ends.
Naviance doesn’t give guarantees, it’s just a very good tool for figuring out reaches, matches and safeties besides the organization, info and linking tools.