Does your school use SchoolLinks, and how accurate is SchoolLinks? My DD’s school just switched over to SchoolLinks from Naviance this year. In the scattergram, there are 3 tabs - Scattergram, Acceptance by GPA, and Appication History. The Scattergram doesn’t seem to match up with Acceptance by GPA. For example, it shows that there were 7 students who got accepted to a T20 school within the last 5 years and 14 students who got rejected within my DD’s GPA range. However, in the scattegram, I don’t see any students getting accepted within her GPA range. Why is there a discrepancy? I asked her guidance counselor and he said the acceptance by GPA data is correct but couldn’t explain the discrepancy. Anectdotally, I think the scattergram is correct but the acceptance by GPA data is incorrect. Students are relying on this product to make informed decisions on which colleges to which they are applying. I hope I am wrong because she relied heavily on SchoolLinks for the ED/EA schools she applied to.
The high school counselors are the keepers of the data that is loaded into any of these software systems. They should know the answers to your questions.
These tools are not predictive. They cannot determine where anyone gets in. There are far too many factors in holistic admissions, especially at the very top colleges. They simply help give a student something of an idea. Regarding the GPA of 7 accepted students, you don’t know if those students were athletes, URM, or had some other hook. Or maybe they simply were really outstanding.
Hopefully your daughter has applied to colleges that she can almost certainly get into, that she likes and that she can afford if accepted. Anything beyond acceptance to a safety is a bonus.
And if your D has not applied to any safeties yet she should do so before the deadlines.
I understand this, all I’m asking is why is there a discrepancy in the data. I asked 1 guidance counselor who couldn’t explain the discrepancy, the 2nd guidance counselor said 1 set of data came from the past 5 years while the 2nd set of data was from last year which I don’t think is correct because I can see the 2nd set of data coming from multiple years.
We are trying to use this tool to get “an idea” for selecting her reaches in the RD round. If there were 7 students who got accepted within the narrow .05 GPA range for the past 5 years, this gives her some hope and it would be reasonable for her to apply to this school as a reach. On the other hand, we see some Ivy league schools that had 0 acceptances within this GPA range, so it’s reasonable to eliminate that school as a reach. Also, the data says there were over 100 total students who got accepted to this school the past 5 years. I could be wrong but this seems too many, even for a high performing public school.
She applied to 3 or 4 safeties in the EA round and already got accepted to 1 that she really likes, so anything better would be gravy.
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