East_Coast_Mom

Our HS has Naviance and as a first time college-hunting parent, I found it to be so very helpful and informative! As noted above, you do not know the real deal, so in some cases it is deceiving.

Last year, the first year for 2400 scores, the seniors were able to figure out who was Valedictorian, etc. based on ED results on the 2400 scale on Naviance. Yes, the top few kids went ED to different schools and there was a sufficient gap between #1 and #2 to know the anticipated final standings.

Needless to say, once guidance realized the exposure, they 'turned off' the ability to see the statistics based on 2400 scores. Apparently the results will be available on the 2400 scale in time for the Class of 2008.

snowball

While I enjoyed looking at the Naviance program while my daughter was looking at school it was only the second year of the program so data was limited. My children attended a small private school so it was easy to figure out some of the kids scores. Our school also keeps a book that list colleges by name and all the data for students that applied there by graduating class over the last 10 years. This data includes GPA, SAT, SAT II, ACT, and AP scores. It then would tell if the student was admitted ED, EA, regular, waitlisted, denied, or enrolled. When you know what schools a student attended or was admitted to, it was real easy to figure out who they were if you really wanted to. My daughter has a friends whos mother is very competitive. She looked in the book and report to me that she did realize my son didn't get into X school. She had figured out which student was my son as he was the only one his year to attend the school he is at. With that information she could search on other school list to see if he had applied. Not that it was a big deal, put I was a bit put out that she took so much time to see how my son did.

collegebound5

While it seems a great thing to have, the information on the scattergrams is actually misleading. The reason is that why you look at the grade point average and SAT scores of those who are accepted, you have no way of knowing who was a recruited athlete, who was a legacy with financial connections to the school, and who might have had some special talent. You might look at a school like Princeton for example and see a particular average of all those who applied, and not realize that two students who were accepted with much lower SAT's and grades were actually athletes who contacted the coaches and were able to get themselves recruited. It is interesting only in that you get to see the number of applications from your high school to each particular college and the number that were accepted over a period of years. Many high schools that do use it do not differentialte early applications versus regular so it is difficult to determine if they were accepted in the early pool or regular pool. I dont think they provide enough meaningful information.
The other thing is there is no way to tell extra curricular involvement. For example a student may be turned down to Harvard for example and have 1600 SAT's and be the valevictorian. Someone else might get in with 1450 and a slightly lower grade point average. You would have no way of knowing that the applicant with a 1600 SAT who was number one was a student who did the typical extra curricular activities, while the other applicant had been been a singer who performed on Broadway once a week, founded a national orgnization to raise money for medical research ect. It is easy to look at the Scattergrams and say, from my childs high school one can get into Princeton with this SAT score and that grade point average, but it might not be true. There may need to be other variables present that you would not know by looking at the scattergram

epiphany

collegebound, I don't think most people read the scattergrams with narrow assumptions about their implications. In other words, I think most view them cautiously, conservatively. It's understood that e.c.'s can always be a swing factor; I think most thoughtful people (like yourself, obviously) look at them "pessimistically." (In some ways, I find the scattergram more helpful as an eliminator than an includer.)

It's important to know the basic category of the school involved (& even more helpful if one knows a lot about the individuals in the class, as I mentioned). For example, at our school, there would be no one with a combo of high GPA & high SATs who would not also be highly achieving in the e.c. category. It has just never happened, that anyone knows of since Naviance has been subscribed to by our school. Second, mostly one will not see a wide variety of stats for any particular college; these stats will tend to be clustered (from our school). Thus, if there is a divergent point for a highly selective college, one does not take that as an indication that lower stats are acceptable, but that this student had a significant hook. There tends to be a correlation between the school that can afford or has chosen to use Naviance, and the better quality of college counseling (search aspects) provided to the students -- whether that's from parents, GC, a private counselor, etc. At least, that's what I've seen.

mathmom

It's true that Naviance scattergrams can't tell you about those legacy and athlete connections. But I know that you could look at our site and see that only one kid was admitted to Harvard with SATs below 1500 and with a weight GPA less than 100. It's a good bit that one kid had something extra going for him. It's possible the others did too. If you don't have those stats, it's easy to guess that you are a very, very long shot. I was surprised for most schools how the acceptences really did cluster into above x SAT score and above y GPA. There were really very few exceptions. Your school's stats may differ.

ellemenope

Kids are pretty savvy about scattergrams. I looked over some with a hs senior last year. When there was an anomaly (acceptance outside the general area of acceptances), he'd say--"Must be an athlete."

He found the scattergrams pretty useful. Kids who don't have stellar grades and SATs worry about whether they will be able to get into any college at all. When I could show him that he was well within the "acceptance area" for UC this or Cal State that with his record as of the end of junior year, it took a load off his mind. It was also useful to show him how far out of the acceptance area he was for UCLA. No disappointment when he was not accepted. (He wanted to try anyway...)

collegebound5

I guess it depends on the school. We had two students admitted to ivy league schools one of whom was in the bottom 1/2 of the class and did not even make the school honor roll although he scored very high on the SAT. There were about 8 applicants from the school with SAT scores as high or higher and who were in the top 5% of the class who did not get accepted to the same colleges. The other student was also in the botton half of the class and his SAT scores were not really competitive. Both were recruited athletes.
We had another applicant who had SAT scores at the 25% range for that ivy league and grades that put that student competitive but not has high as the other applicants of which there were many. Those applicants had much higher SAT scores as well. That applicant however was a legacy whose family was a significant donor.
I am just saying that the scattergrams have to be approached conversatively as one poster mentioned.
It also depends on the schools one is applying to. I believe that for the top ivy leagues ie. HYP, that if one is not in the category of legacy, recruited athlete, develpment cases, that they generally (although not a rule) fall into one of two categories. Either the applicant has competitive grades and SAT scores (although not perfect or near perfect) taking the most rigorous curriculum but also has extracurriculars that show great passion, leadership, accomplishment, talent (it also helps if the applicant has excelled in something unusual and has accomplishment on the International and/or National level) OR the applicant has perfect or near perfect standardized test scores, number one in class ect and also has particular awards or accomplishments that are highly regarded in the intellectual field. ie. intell, publishing reserach in a well known medical journal ect. It is not to say that others who do not have these cannot get in. Many can write extraordinary essays, have unbelievable teacher recs. It is more the rule than the exception that applicants who have perfect or near perfect SAT scores and class rank but have rather ordinary involvement at school (not really ordinary, but typical of other applicants who also apply to the same colleges) have difficulty standing out in an applicant pool of 20,000.

pamavision

Naviance is something of a sore subject with me, as I convinced our reluctant HS counselor to subscribe to the service, only to be told a few months later that she didn't have time for it, the tech guy wasn't helping her, the district wasn't giving her the information she needed, our school was so small that the scattergrams would be meaningless ("We've only ever had one student apply to Williams, so what's the point of having a scattergram for Williams?"), that the information we needed about GPAs and SATs of admitted students was readily available in college guidebooks anyway, so what was the point of having school-specific info, that the graphs didn't take into account extracurriculars, recruited athletes, legacies, etc, and so on and so forth. Our school does release a table of students accepted/denied at the UCs each year, which shows GPAs, SAT 1 and 2 scores, semesters of honors and APs, and the college that student eventually attended. (And it's such a small school, and so many of our kids apply to the UCs, that I can tell you the SAT scores and GPAs of most of my kids' friends, just by looking at the schools they are attending!) If we had this info info in graphical form for the colleges that a number of our kids apply to, I could plot my kid's GPA and SAT scores and say, "Look at all the red Xs - better think about applying somewhere else" or "Blue and green Xs -good chance at this school! Go for it" using real-world data from our specific school. It would be particularly useful early in the college search process, to give families an idea whether there was a realistic chance that their kid would be accepted at a particular college, especially for the more numbers-driven schools to which many of our students apply. But the counselor doesn't see this, and there's no convincing her. I've been trying to use last year's data to create an Excel scattergram for the UCs myself, but I'm so computer illiterate that it's slow going. It's really frustrating.

shelf-life

One wise and witty guidance counselor cautioned parents that naviance should come with the standard financial offering disclaimer that "past performance is not an indicator of future results."

goaliedad

I've only recently discovered Naviance (my D is in 9th grade), and have poked throught the scattergrams that are public for one school I am familiar with (my D's school requires a password) and found it to be a potentially a very good tool.

I agree that its greatest weakness is insufficient data points.

I agree that with small numbers of applicants, annonymity of applicants data can be compromised.

What I'd love to see though is...

The ability for schools to share data with "peer" schools (schools identified to have similar demographics) within their area. If you could pick up 10 peer schools data, the significance of the results would increase dramatically. This would also improve annonymity. It would require schools to agree to release data and to report data (GPA) in a standard methodology which could present some problems or exclude schools from your peer group.

When reporting small sample size (no matter how many schools are in your peer group, there are always schools that aren't that popular), the scatter plot should be replaced (if less than 5 data points) with only the average lines. And if larger than 5 with a chart showing the lines (averages) with shaded areas showing the +- 1 and 2 standard deviations for the accepted and rejected applicants. This gives an applicant a similar feel for the distribution of grades/gpa without that exact detail that reveals confidential information.

Now taking these shaded areas (which you could replace all scattergrams with), you could input your applicants values and school preferences (geography, size, degree offerings, ECs, etc) from the other Naviance tools and generate a list of prospective fits, reaches, and safeties based upon that statistical analysis. This might help identify schools that the applicant may never have heard of or considered.

Any thoughts?

jmmom

Well, I think data from peer schools would be interesting. But there is a belief, which seems valid to me from all that I have read and heard, that colleges get to "know" a number of high schools. To me, this means that there is inherent value in seeing how kids from your particular school have fared. Whether your school is "known" to a college or not, the results from your own school give you a lot more to go on than the results from even the school down the road. The best of both worlds would probably be great, goaliedad - ie, a scattergram for your school and a scattergram for your coterie of peer schools. But if I could only have one, setting aside privacy concerns and focusing on valuable information for projecting my kid's chances, I'd want the data for my school only.

roshke

One thing you do have to be careful about when looking at "comparable" school district Naviance data is that the GPA is calculated the same way in each district. I was interested to see Naviance data from a HS in our old area, and both schools even graded on the same 5.0 scale. However, I realized that there is one major difference and that is that one district only counts the major subjects in the GPA whereas the other school district counts all the elective subjects too, yet does not weight these. So a 4.5 GPA was the best that you can do at one school whereas the other had a kid with a 5.0.

When comparing your school to another just make sure you are comparing apples to apples.

goaliedad

I did mention that standardization of GPA difficulty briefly and that is probably the fly in the ointment.

Of course the colleges probably have a methodology to standardize these GPAs based upon the writeup that schools give them regarding their grading policies. Let's face it, how else would they be able to compare students from different schools.

I think the more important improvement is the idea of a shaded area based upon the data points in the scattergram showing plus/minus 1 and 2 standard deviations from the averages for the score and GPA. It kinda makes a target area that you can plot your own statistics against without divulging specific scores.

Of course the shaded area concept requires a bit more knowledge of statistics, which many of the kids haven't had yet. A learning exercise!

collegebound5

Most colleges now forget about the gpa and look at the base grade in the class. They understand that two different schools two students can both get a 90 in the same subject, but one of them goes to a school where the 90 becomes a 4.0, and then is converted to a 4.5 in the case of an honors class, or a 5.0 in the case of an AP course, while a student at another high school how similarly received a 90, could find that they receive a weighted 95 in the case of an honors couse or 100 in the case of an AP, both of which are under a 4.0. They understand that there could be two students from two different schools, one of whom graduates with a weighted 98 and one of whom graduates with a weighted grade point average over 5.0, but the student with the 98 could have peformed better in all of their classes.
With this in mind the colleges look to see the base grade in the class. They want to know if the student took the most rigiorous curriculum and what was the unweighted grade they received. They can get an idea from the school for example what the unweighted grade means. ie. how that student did versus other students who took the same courses at their school

anitaw

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'...