| Our school started using Naviance the year my #2 graduated. His own fine admissions results were, therefore, completely exposed to the crowd. As a result, evidently, a substantial portion of the following class started off the year with unrealistic expectations of where their GPA would take them. My son's GPA had been very significantly and repeatedly impacted by his taking very high level 3rd language courses...so-- colleges looking at the 'whole picture' saw one kid while rising juniors and seniors saw only 2 numbers (his SAT's and his overall GPA). My guess is that when any of the colleges re-calculated his GPA they tossed out these grades as the anomalies they were...But, those looking at Naviance couldn't have known.
Everyone looking at these numbers MUST be aware of the significance of small sample sizes in using them in a predictive sense. For us, as our school did not provide this data in advance, we looked at data of 'comparable' schools with much more data (5 years?) and made 'guesstimates'... |