“Good point Sudsie. How do students without access to Naviance data draw the line between formulaic schools (some of which claim to be holistic) and the others? This is more about data to find good matches and safeties rather than reaches.”
It’s not just not having access to Naviance - it’s sample size. One of my kids was the first kid ever from that school to apply to that college. So they had Naviance, but what good did it do? Again, when people talk about having sooooo many data points from their kid’s school at Harvard, they are ALREADY in a very select high school environment.
And therefore - voiceofreason, this is an important point – the odds for the 3.9 / 2350 coming from one milieu are completely different from the odds for the 3.9 / 2350 coming from another milieu. A 3.9 / 2350 out of New Trier HS is not the same thing as a 3.9 / 2350 from a kid from the South Side of Chicago who has to duck gunshots when he goes home. So therefore … don’t you understand that the % of the pool of 3.9 / 2350 who get it is meaningless without the broader context of who is in that pool? If in 2014 the bulk of the 3.9 / 2350’s are coming from New Trier and its affluent suburban counterparts throughout the nation, what on earth does that have to do with the chances of the kid from the South Side of Chicago with the same scores a year later? It’s meaningless.