^ there are so many things naviance could easily do to improve usefulness. My order of priority would be:
date filters would be easy to implement and incredibly useful. given my ocd nature, I took snapshots of the graphs before and after outcomes this year so now we have the last year of data :^)
@Much2learn, top 50 research U’s?
An ACT of 30 is about 95th percentile and keep in mind that the US is a huge country with a lot of kids and the elites tend to be privates with quite a bit fewer slots than state schools, so the top 50 RU’s may have 5-6% of all total college slots or so.
What this means is that there’s a lot more sorting going on than a generation ago.
Back then, rankings weren’t as big a deal (just going to college was), and so many with high test scores likely just went somewhere local no matter where it was ranked. These days, probably most with a 30 or above are aiming for a top 50 RU or top 50 LAC.
There is also a lot naviance could do to be a better data collection repository for students. Comments sections by college names to store feedback on visits… etc. Information on if supplements are required or not for specific schools, etc…It should also have the collegedata type info within it - stuff collected from the Common Data Sets.
@ucbalumnus “Wouldn’t Naviance plots also be misleading at schools with different selectivity by division or major (e.g. CMU, NYU, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, and many state flagship universities)?”
Yes, they are. For top 20-30 schools, they are very misleading anyway. To me the biggest problem is that parents and students tend to look at the average acceptance gpa and test score level as if they will probably be admitted if they can get to that. They often do not notice that at top schools, most students with those scores are rejected.
Also, it can be hard to understand the data at a large school if there are multiple green, blue, and red points stacked on top of one another.
Most? I’m not sure about that. Not if the EFC for those top 100 schools is beyond the parent budget.
@PurpleTitan "“top 50 research U’s?” Yes.
“An ACT of 30 is about 95th percentile and …there’s a lot more sorting going on than a generation ago. Back then, … many with high test scores likely just went somewhere local … These days, probably most with a 30 or above are aiming for a top 50 RU or top 50 LAC.”
That is exactly right. There is a lot more tiering. Still, I was surprised that I had to leave the top 50 research Us to find a school with an average acceptance of a 29 ACT.
Additionally, it also seems to me that a silver lining about the level of competition among top students, at least at our district, is that the number of students who have a 30+ ACT is rising, although I don’t know whether they are higher in aggregate nationally. Perhaps, if there is a forced curve, students at top schools are just taking them away from students at more average schools? Nevertheless, if more top students know more in aggregate, that has to be a positive.
It also highlights an unfortunate fact in our society, that there is more pressure on the top 5% of students to improve, than there is on students on the bottom 95%. I would love to see more threads on cc: where a student has a 21 or 22 ACT score and wants to know what s/he can do to improve to a 24 or 25 score, so they can have the opportunity to attend an amazing University like Michigan State, or a student with an 17 ACT who wants to earn a 21 and gain skills that will greatly increase their odds of success and graduating from college.
^^ I’m not sure GC would necessarily know about legacy applications or even URM (remember, some ORMs at some schools are actually URM at others). I think Naviance is just a guide. It may show trends and give students an idea of whether or not the school may be a realistic option. I don’t think it will ever be able to inform the user more precisely how well the application process will go for a specific child. There are just too many moving parts for both the applicant and the college. We saw acceptance rates take a dive when a college received increasingly more applications within the last five years (e.g., Pitzer, Whitman).
I just looked at our school’s Naviance. It has D’s SAT score (that she did not send in) but not her much better ACT score. She was the sole applicant to apply to three of her schools and the only accepted student to a fourth school. Interestingly, her GPA is not the same at all four schools. Instead of adding more features, I’d focus more on better and more accurate data.
When D was applying to schools, we took “middle tier” to be any school outside the top 50, had more than 40% acceptance rate, and/or the median ACT was well below 30 - maybe 26,27. D wanted to be among the top 25% so I looked for schools where she was at or above the 75th percentile.
Not if the child had a less than stellar GPA. D eschewed schools with sub 35% acceptance rates for that reason.
I found Naviance 100% useful.
In 2010 I was able to predict the results of ten out of ten of my son’s applications using Naviance.
In 2014 I was able to predict the results of my other son’s one (ED) application.
Granted this is small, anecdotal evidence, but I believe if you interpret the results carefully and you have a decent sample set (it does not have to be huge, S1’s HS graduates approx. 100 per year and S2’s was only slightly bigger) it can be very useful.
@soze Could you please explain your methodology?
Details please!
@much2learn; Amen! I too would love to see more threads on CC for average kids/families. In fact I think higher stat kids/families have a bunch of useful information and knowledge to share. Unfortunately, when average kids/parents post on CC many veteran posters and higher stat kids/families make those average kids/parents feel like the village idiot, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. I know back when we first stumbled upon CC, when D16 was a freshmen, just reading a thread or two and seeing the high stats kids’ ec(s)/gpa/test scores was enough to send me (as a parent) into panic mode, it is intimidating, We weren’t looking to get in to HYPS type schools. It took some fortitude to stick it out and mine CC for information on these “middle tier” schools and the stats for not “rockstar”, top10%, NMF kids and to let negative comments that reeked of “EEWW, seriously who would even think about that school” or “you don’t have a chance of attending a top100 school let alone a top 50 school” roll off our back.
@LucieTheLakie, among those top 50 are 15 publics located in states that include 40% of this country’s population. And if in-state tuition is too expensive for a family, it’s likely that they make little enough to qualify for a lot of fin aid from the elite privates (not to mention that UVa, UNC, and UMich promise to meet need for in-state kids, CA fin aid is generous, FL has Bright Futures and GA has the Hope and Miller scholarships). So that leaves the upper-middle-class and middle-class people in the other states, but some of the schools in the lower half of the top 50 also give out some big scholarships, so yes, most kids with a high test score are aiming for a top 50 school.
If you say so, @PurpleTitan, but I’d love to see some documentation.
Hmm. I grew up in Mornngside Heights in the 70s and 80s. I don’t think the area around Columbia/Barnard was EVER “bad” in terms of crime. However, Morningside PARK was a place everyone knew to avoid. (Not anymore, I noted on a recent visit).
Regarding Naviance, our seniors input their results in the presence of the GCs, all together (in periods that day), if they haven’t done it as they came in. No clue how much cross-checking goes on.
@Dustyfeathers :
Basically I looked at every applicant for the past five years to the schools to which my kids applied.
The first task is to throw away the hooked applicants. This is often the students who are well below the mean SAT and GPA for admitted applicants from that HS to that college for the year in question.
The next task is to figure out what to do with the “rejected outliers” – those students who are well above the qualifications of admitted applicants, but are rejected nevertheless. If it’s a school that known for rejecting overqualified applicants – that can be an explanation, if it’s a really, really selective school then that can explain any rejection, etc.
For those that are left, I look at the mean SAT and GPA of admitted applicants. For those schools where my kids were at least 0.15 GPA points and 100 SAT points above the mean, I assumed “admit.” For those schools where my kids were below either of the means, I assumed “rejection.” For all others, I assumed “waitlist.”
Using this method, I was net 11 for 11 in predicting outcomes for my two kids.
Maybe I was a bit lucky, but I do think if you look at the data carefully, Naviance can be an extremely valuable tool for predicting outcomes.
A few more things I learned, that need to be taken into consideration (and many parents are either in denial about these or simply choose to ignore them):
This can also be due to such “rejected outliers” applying to selective majors or divisions at schools which do not admit to a second choice major or division.
Of course, being admitted to a second choice major or division (or as a general undeclared student) may not be that great a consolation prize if changing into the actual first choice major is very difficult after enrolling.
Students in California should realize that Universities of California can produce unpleasant surprises the other way. Test scores way above the range of a UC campus may not be enough to compensate for a GPA only a little below the range for that campus.
Yep, many public flagships care about GPA and class rank but many privates outside the tippy-top care a lot about test scores.
@soze well, my GPA was below the mean for all 14 universities to which I applied, and I still got into six of them. My SAT was also above my school’s average for most of the colleges on my list, and I still was denied from eight of them. I also had a hook and a compelling story told in my essay. Great SATs, hooks, and resilience doesn’t always overcome a weaker GPA.
As someone who has been unhealthily addicted to Naviance for a few months now (I love analyzing data) I agree with a few of the above posts.
The lack of distinction of colleges between universities is very misleading. A good example is CMU scatter-grams, where you see lots of "X"s to the upper right of concentrations of greens. While there could be many things leading to this discrepancy, it seems logical to me that many of those apply to schools within the U with much lower acceptance rates, such as CS.
Holistic application schools, by definition, make individual data for acceptance impossible. However, I found those graphs to be valuable for 2 reasons: understanding how unlikely admission is even for top performers, and also the identification of the “don’t bother” point.
The graphs are too low-res to zoom and see the data in detail, and you should be able to exclude certain data from the graphs for clarity. This is dashboard 101 in the web world.
The most egregious weakness is the “school stats” which shows the difference between EA and regular, is for some reason NOT shown on the scatter-grams - at least not at the schools I have looked at. Thoughts?
I pulled a lot of data into a spreadsheet and did some comparisons, and one possible pattern I did notice was a “bump” in admission rates from exclusive but need-aware schools from our high-income area. No surprise there I guess.
Overall it seems pretty clear that the likelihood of predictability goes up in parallel with the overall acceptance rate. Again, that doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out! 
@Soze “2. For most schools, test scores are much more important than they would admit.”
I make a spread sheet for the kids with the top 100 Research Us. (They are engineering and math kids, sorry LACs). I put in the average admitted gpa and test score from Naviance for each one. Next to it I have a column where I note whether the school rejects students in the upper right quadrant of students who have grade/test score combinations that are above average. The options are: No= all accepted, yes=a few rejected/waitlisted, many=many rejected/waitlisted, most=most students with above the average grades/test scores are rejected.
If I remember correctly, I was into the 30’s (in terms of ranking) before there was a school where everyone who was above the mean accepted gpa/test score was admitted from our high school. It may have been URoch, or William and Mary.
@purpletitan Yep, many public flagships care about GPA and class rank but many privates outside the tippy-top care a lot about test scores.
The top privates all care about test scores a lot too, but weight them somewhat less, and tend to give more weight to gpa and extracurriculars. Highly ranked schools that are the most concerned about their ranking seem to put the most weight on test scores, so they can claim that their student body is “just as good as X, Y and Z.”
@soze , great post. I agree with most of what you said, especially that test scores are more important than most colleges would admit. I am very sure that my D got into her school because of test scores, AND her essay. Her grades were in the 50-60th percentile. I do think the essay is really important at colleges which practice holistic admissions. With a 25% acceptance rate, they could have admitted any number of other kids in her place. I know a kid who had basically a C average, but an ACT score of 34. He was accepted at 14 of 14 colleges he applied to, most with merit aid. IMO, the test scores are very important, but I think the essay has more importance, the more selective the college is.