Looking at Naviance for S25’s school, and even though my kid’s SAT score seems low by CC standards and for many of the schools on their list, it is high compared to most of their school peers (NYC public, non-competitive school). Kids have gotten into many of S25s schools with scores way lower than the college’s mid-range. Does this likely mean 1) most applied TO or 2) colleges review SAT scores in the context of the applicants school? Curious since S25 was planning to apply TO nearly everywhere, but now he’s reconsidering.
It’s worth a call to the school’s guidance office to ask if subsequent scores get updated in Naviance, or if the GC’s just log in the first set of scores and then don’t bother updating when the kid takes the tests a second time.
I know this has tripped up kids in the past- the whole “garbage in, garbage out” phenomenon. The kid who got a 620 math and then gets in to Michigan engineering- every other kid in the HS (including freshman) gets excited- “Michigan loves our HS” until is it revealed that the kid took it again when he DIDN’T have a crippling migraine, and got a 780 which never made it into Naviance.
I wouldn’t assume here…
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“Garbage in garbage out” is definitely an issue with Naviance at our sxhool…and seems to be getting worse. A lot of data points are missing, the data shown on the graph differs slightly from the data shown below it in the table, etc. They recently added data on 2024 graduates and there are a lot who I know applied to and got in to various schools ED but the data shows EA.
Naviance is definitely helpful but only to a point.
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My interpretation in these situations is that students have applied Test Optional. In some cases, they may also have a hook, but still are likely applying test optional.
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Those students may well have applied TO. From what I gather, applying test optional was more prevalent/accepted during the years directly following COVID than it is now. More and more colleges are now requiring standardized tests and for many TO colleges, a higher percentage of students seem to include standardized tests.
Best to discuss with the guidance counselor at the HS who should be able to offer some school-specific advice.
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My experience with Naviance regarding my older son, before Covid & Test Optional, was that it was accurate and a valuable tool.
My experience with Naviance for my younger son, that was during Covid & Test Optional, was that it was unreliable.
I have had other parents tell me the same.
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That makes sense. However, S25’s school is a Title 1 where most of the kids go to community college or art colleges. I doubt there are many retakes happening (maybe I am wrong here but there is little emphasis on college readiness at their school). I am looking at a school like Binghamton that is used as a reach for a lot of kids at our high school, and where there are hundreds of data points and about 30% of the kids in S25’s school are accepted. The average SAT score is 1200 which is well below Binghamton’s norm. Trying to figure out if these are kids that applied TO or Binghamton looks at kid’s within the context of their school.
Unfortunately, we have a very unhelpful disconnected GC who has 400 kids to deal with. They basically push buttons on sending recs and transcripts. 
This makes sense to me.
No way of knowing who was a recruited athlete, URM, or legacy. If URM, definitely submit a 25th% score.
My kids go to a big city public school (not NYC), and we definitely have the garbage in, garbage out problem.
My older kid took the PSAT once and the ACT once; neither score was captured in Naviance, so he does not even show up as a point on the graphs. My younger kid has taken the PSAT twice and the SAT once, and only the two PSAT scores are captured in Naviance, with the second one used to plot him on the graph. It’s really unreliable for test scores.
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Since no one has taken up this aspect of your original post yet, I will say that, yes, colleges do look at a student’s scores etc. in the context of their high school.
I can’t say I’m certain Binghamton does this as standard practice. But I know other selective schools do it.
In fact, I’ve witnessed it in an application-assessment session I attended at a selective liberal arts college. (I’ve mentioned this before here.) In that session, a student under review from a somewhat under-performing high school had a quite good but not spectacular SAT score.
One of the admissions officers said, “wow, her SAT score is 250 points higher than her school average.” That data point seemed to be given substantial weight.
I only witnessed a few assessments, though, so I don’t know how consistently that standard was applied.
The information about average SAT score is given on the high school fact sheet. But other information that puts a student’s record in context—high school, neighborhood, etc.—comes from a College Board service called Landscape, which I know is increasingly used by selective colleges to achieve socio-economic diversity in the wake of the Supreme Court decision banning race-based affirmative action.
Of course this kind of assessment can have its faults. It can make a rather privileged kid from a so-so high school seem spectacular, as if they had overcome substantial adversity—when in fact they may have had a highly supportive, academically inclined upbringing, taken the most rigorous courses in high school with a smallish cohort of similarly prepared kids, etc.
Here’s a rather ancient (2015) article that speaks to the latter issue, written by a Yale admit who was quite privileged but deemed valuable for “representing” under-privileged inner-city (Minneapolis) public schools (I’m sure it’s been linked here before):
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Yes, colleges that have the resources and motivation to assess the student’s performance on a relative basis do so. This was the whole rationale behind Dartmouth returning to test-required. They found that they were rejecting kids they might have admitted if they had their test scores, even though the test scores achieved by those students were well below the median for Dartmouth.
That noted, and as others have observed, it is also true that while the scattergrams for a high school’s instance of Naviance or Scoir might show the test scores of prior students, they may not show whether the students actually submitted test scores to the colleges where they were admitted.
Colleges also consider an applicant’s background when viewing SAT/ACT score. The expected test score for a competitive prep school kid is not the same for someone from an under-resourced public school. Likely, AOs know that students here will not be paying thousands on test prep, and thus a lower test score won’t hurt a student’s application as much, if at all, if the GPA is good.
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We have the opposite problem. Our school is a large public HS that ranks pretty high nationally. Our averages for acceptances are typically much higher than the CDS shown in Naviance for the college. (For example, if College A’s average GPA range is 3.0 to 3.5 and SAT is 1100-1300, the middle 25-75 for our HS accepted is 3.3 to 3.7 and SAT is 1200-1400.) Too many high performing kids from our HS. If you’re a Pixar fan, “and when everyone’s super… no one will be.” Sigh.
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