<p>How many of you have the situation where what your Naviance says seems completely different than what a particular college's website is stating about average GPA? </p>
<p>There are quite a few schools where we have noticed kids are accepted with dramatically lower GPAs than what the college seems to intimate on their website. (I don't mean a couple of data points either, I mean lots and lots of data points. I also realize that the colleges are talking about "middle 50 percent" but this goes beyond that, with kids even .5 to .66 lower than the college's stated average GPA being admitted consistently.)</p>
<p>Is this a reflection of our own school's average GPA...perhaps it is lower than a typical schools thus making lower GPAs at our school mean something closer to higher GPAs at another school? And if so, how on earth would a college even know that to the extent where these lower GPA students are consistently admitted?</p>
<p>Hmmm…I’ll need to go back and look at Naviance. I was seeing the exact opposite. The kids that were admitted from our school had higher than average GPA. These were at my son’s reach schools, so maybe that makes a difference.</p>
<p>I do think it’s impossible to compare GPAs from one high school to the next (it’s really only relevant in the context of a particular HS) and I also know that most colleges recalculate the GPAs based on their own formula. Also, I think (no proof) that the colleges tend to inflate their average GPAs. I’ve looked at schools from the Top 20 to my state university and they all seem to have a very high GPA and I know our state school will take almost anyone. That makes me think that the colleges post the highest average GPA they can calculate.</p>
<p>Firstly, the GPAs can be weighted or unweighted, and the college can be reweighting them or not.</p>
<p>Secondly, the college will get a School Profile with the transcript, and these profiles will typically give some idea of GPA distribution at that school, even if the school doesn’t rank.</p>
<p>There may also be issues of whether GPA is calculated included or excluding things such as gym, band, and other classes that are not strictly core academics.</p>
<p>I have noticed the same thing on Naviance and I think your theory is right. The colleges get a profile of the high school and they have a good idea of the rigor of that particular school. A 3.5 might be equivalent to a 4.0 at a less rigorous school. I also think that geography plays a part of it sometimes, as well. A school might favor students from another state in order to increase their geographic diversity and may be willing to accept students with stats that are a bit lower than they normally would in order to bring students from a particular state.</p>
<p>Do you mean outliers, like one or two acceptances with much lower scores? Those are likely either athletes, minorities, the very rich or very connected alums - or some combination of the above. Our naviance pages show kids with ridiculously low gpa’s getting into top schools, but then you find out who they are.</p>
<p>RTR: we have seen that here ALOT, but we are in a private school where GPA’s are definitely deflated and unweighted…lots of kids admitted WAY below the colleges website GPA averages.
Interestingly, though, the few highly ranked large publics that a few students do apply to reject our kids like there is no tomorrow…</p>
<p>We saw that last year with our school’s Naviance. We are a public school that is highly regarded. and adcoms at most top private schools seem aware that lots of outstanding students do not have that very high unweighted GPA . We found that our child’s outcomes reflected the Naviance data rather than college website GPA averages, but our child did not apply to the highly ranked UC’s.</p>
<p>One of the observations we had with Naviance was that there was no way to tell whether a student was an athlete or URM. At my daughter’s school, those factors seemed to make a big difference on who was accepted. She went to a small school that had only used the Naviance program for about five years, so it was easy to tell who had been accepted certain places and the grades were lower than for other girls who had been rejected.</p>
<p>Both my kids’ schools have Naviance data back to 2001. We found it a better indicator of success with apps than CC or the colleges’ data, which is why there are some schools we are more optimistic about and others where we know there is little chance.</p>
<p>Caveat: both kids are in specialized programs where grades tend to run low and ambitions run high. Some schools love these kids; others, not so much.</p>
<p>We found Naviance to be an excellent method to ascertain reach, safety and match schools for our D. There were some seeming outliers in both acceptances and rejections from our h.s. for the schools we considered but the information was very useful for showing us the “dream” was the possibility it has turned out to be. D has an unusual EC interest, I googled that + colleges and we narrowed the list down from there with the frequent use of Naviance. I’m so glad our h.s. has it.</p>
<p>I also found the Naviance data of great value in advising my daughter once she had assembled a college list of about thirty schools. Had we not had access to Naviance, I might have discouraged her from applying to several schools on her list, based on anecdotal reports about these schools. It was clear from Naviance that these schools were well within her reach, showing a 50% acceptance rate of students with her GPA and test scores. The results of her applications bore this out - she was accepted to half the schools with 50% acceptance rates from similar students at our high school.</p>
<p>Perhaps because our graduating classes number in the hundreds and many students applying to top schools apply to multiple schools, it was easy to spot the outliers who had to have been either URM’s or recruited athletes. (The pool of students applying to these schools greatly exceeds the numbers of URM’S, recruited athletes, and others with hooks.) I can imagine that with a smaller pool of applicants,or with LAC’s where large numbers of students have an athletic hook, this could prove more difficult.</p>
<p>This works the other way, too. We also easily eliminated several schools that seemed to reject most applicants in D’s stat range, although websites and cc boards seemed to indicate that she would have decent chances of being accepted.</p>
<p>Finally, some news that makes me optimistic when reading CC! Our school, too, shows lower GPA admit rates for many schools than reading CC would lead me to believe! It also makes it easier to rank schools as likely matches and reaches and not to have it totally a dart throwing exercise!</p>
<p>This thread prompted me to go on our school’s Naviance and tool around. We’ve only had it a couple of years and the school is on the small side so there was no data for some of ds’s choices, but he sits about where I would have thought. It would be easier for him to get into some highly desirable schools on the coasts than his in-state no. 1 choice.</p>
<p>One interesting note: Not a single person from our school has gotten into Brown, despite some very high stats. Wonder what’s up with that …</p>
<p>Agree with others who say that Naviance is a good gauge for safety/match/reach for kids from your own school. Especially if there are lots (15+) of recent (last 2 years) data points with few outliers.</p>
<p>I have always found the college website GPA data almost meaningless next to the Naviance type of info out of an individual HS. If you are talking about consistent results and not one or two outliers, that should be a much more accurate indication to you of what you might expect. As mentioned, the HS will provide the college with a school profile, which, among other things includes a distribution of GPAs within a given decile of the class, even from schools that do not rank. A 3.5 in one school might put you in the top half of a class, at another it might be top 10% . Colleges have a lot of other information that help to put a HS into context as well- average SAT scores, % who go on to college and more. In addition, college reported GPA seems completely meaningless considering the broad range of high schools as well as the differences in calculating GPA from school to school and from college to college.</p>
<p>When in doubt, go with Naviance as long as a reasonable number of students have applied (to avoid a few URM/jock/hook kids distorting the numbers). SAT optional College numbers may exclude low SAT kids who did not submit them, but will be on Naviance.<br>
And every HS will have some colleges where it has always done surprisingly well and some where it has always done surprisingly badly. It can be as simple as the local college rep liking or disliking the GC rep or having gone to the archrival of the HS.
Make sure you check the Naviance section to be ED is not a factor in lower scorers being admitted.
And an HS may do better than the average if it is more affluent and thus less often applies for FA.</p>
<p>Find out if the school profile really does include GPA distributions and the grade weighting formula if your school does not release class rank. Most HS’s now post this on their websites. If this information is not given to colleges, it works against students who apply to selective colleges, especially those that do not recalculate GPA (about half of them). Alumni interviewers in our community think this is why our HS’s non-URM, non-athletes have been consistently rejected from certain Ivies, though they were high achieving and had scores in the top quartile of accepted students, according to the college’s stats (they also think the guidance department must have antagonized the admissions officers.) In our HS, when we take the URMs and athletes out of the mix, Naviance is a great predictor. For a URM or an athlete, it can be helpful to see where similar kids had success from your HS, if you are able to tease this out from Naviance.</p>