@Dustyfeathers :
Basically I looked at every applicant for the past five years to the schools to which my kids applied.
The first task is to throw away the hooked applicants. This is often the students who are well below the mean SAT and GPA for admitted applicants from that HS to that college for the year in question.
The next task is to figure out what to do with the “rejected outliers” – those students who are well above the qualifications of admitted applicants, but are rejected nevertheless. If it’s a school that known for rejecting overqualified applicants – that can be an explanation, if it’s a really, really selective school then that can explain any rejection, etc.
For those that are left, I look at the mean SAT and GPA of admitted applicants. For those schools where my kids were at least 0.15 GPA points and 100 SAT points above the mean, I assumed “admit.” For those schools where my kids were below either of the means, I assumed “rejection.” For all others, I assumed “waitlist.”
Using this method, I was net 11 for 11 in predicting outcomes for my two kids.
Maybe I was a bit lucky, but I do think if you look at the data carefully, Naviance can be an extremely valuable tool for predicting outcomes.
A few more things I learned, that need to be taken into consideration (and many parents are either in denial about these or simply choose to ignore them):
- For selective schools, the difficulty in getting admitted as an unhooked applicant is much harder than the raw stats (% admitted, mean GPA, mean scores, etc). would indicate as these always include hooked applicants which for some schools can be a very big chunk of the incoming class.
- For most schools, test scores are much more important than they would admit.
- For most schools, in most cases, essays and recommendations don't matter much at all.
- Unless you're a recruited athlete, sports don't mean much either.
- Applying ED can make or break the application in a lot of cases. Between spots taken by hooked applicants and ED applicants, there are often simply very, very few spots left for unhooked, RD applicants.
- This was not the case for my kids, as neither were applying to STEM programs, but I've seen this with lots of friends kids. If you're applying to anything close to a top STEM program, you will need AP everything in math/science and your SAT/ACT and AP scores in STEM should be pretty much perfect.. Frankly an 800 math SAT is not that hard to get (one of my kids got it, and frankly he stinks at math). Realistically, if you can't get a all A's in HS math/science, how do you think you're going to do at an engineering program at MIT or Stanford?