How accurate is Parchment?

TooOld4School
Thu, 07 Jan 2016 06:01:32 +0000

Here’s an example with Parchment. If you take an very high stat kid at a private school applying to Vanderbilt- the vast majority of which don’t rank - , and change their class ranking from “not ranked” to “top 10%” admission chances go up from 55 to 65%. Change the rank to top 3% and you are at 72%. There are lots of inconsistencies in their model. I would use it as a very imperfect guide, say it is accurate plus or minus 20%. Naviance is more localized and more accurate, but it almost always overestimates because it is backward looking and admission percentages have generally dropped during the 7 year time frame displayed. There is also too much data to be usefully displayed on the graphs and you cannot compare GPA across high schools.