An Entire Thread on Naviance and Prep Schools

alooknac
Sat, 20 Feb 2016 02:52:04 +0000

D’s school does not participate in the Naviance Parent Questionnaire but her GC asked parents to answer some open-ended questions to help her write recommendations.

D used Naviance only when required to do so. She didn’t take a very active role in college selection at all. We have serious need of FinAid so it actually worked better for me to analyze CDS financial data, present colleges to D, and work from there. Of course we started by building a list of selection criteria together, then I basically did the work of a college consultant.

I found the scattergrams very helpful. I felt I got an instant snapshot of chances in a very broad sense. Our acceptance data went back more than 10 years! Maybe because it’s a very small school. I don’t think D applied to any schools where she was under the bar. At some she appears to be a shoo in, others she is borderline and acceptance will probably depend on a lot more than stats.

After looking at a scattergram I made sure to check the list showing acceptances by year since college admissions seems to be getting more competitive all the time and D’s school’s stats go back over a decade. And, indeed, there were a fair number of cases where the scattergram and the overall % accepted didn’t look too bad, but when I looked at the list I’d find, for instance, there had been no admits in the last 4 or 5 years.

Definitely some colleges like the students at D’s school and a few seem to dislike. With a small sample some of that could be random. I loved the “overlap” feature showing if a student applied to X College, they also applied to Y College. Traveling down those roads helped me fill out D’s college list.