<p>Naviance lists the avg GPA of accepted students within my daughter’s school - and I’m noticing it differs a lot from the avg GPA on the schools’ official sites. For instance, one school’s official avg GPA for accepted freshmen is 3.5, but on Naviance for our school, it’s 3.25 for accepted students.</p>
<p>Which one do we use when judging whether she has a shot at acceptance?</p>
<p>That probably means that the GPA your high school puts in its Naviance is weighted different from how the GPA the college reports is weighted.</p>
<p>Use your school’s GPA, it’s closer to what that college is looking for from students at your daughter’s high school. </p>
<p>There can be lots of reasons for the difference, but the big ones are the difficulty of the curriculum at your school, the variation in grading standards, desire for geographical diversity, or statistical quirk. The more acceptances your school has, and recent years are better than older ones but that doesn’t show on Naviance, the more likely the reported HS average is correct. </p>
<p>Check with your college advisor to make sure, they can tell you if your daughter has a true shot.</p>
<p>I don’t know if each school purchases a different set of features from Naviance or has control over how the info is displayed…but our school provides an EA/ED avg GPA and the RD avg GPA as well as a weighted average of the two. We now have six years of data and as MrMom commented above, no way to determine if a data point was a 2008 admit or a more relevant 2013 admit.</p>
<p>There is also no way to determine if the ED admits were all recruited athletes or legacies, so I try to keep that in mind when looking at ED GPAs. Conversely, we don’t have a first generation to college or URM population, so our RD GPAs could also be off.</p>
<p>Even among very comparable surrounding public high schools, one school will offer a 4.3 for an A+ while another stops at 4.0. One school will weight AP and Honor courses at +.5 and another at +.67, so if there are enough applicants to a college, your own high school’s Naviance probably provides a more realistic picture than GPAs quoted in the CDS.</p>
<p>How long has your school had Naviance a md what is the number of applicants to any particular University? If the # of apps are low, your schools acceptance rate really isn’t accurate.</p>
<p>Use the official college GPA, rather than what Naviance says. In most cases, your school hasn’t had enough people apply to the college for information to be accurate. However, if at least 200 or so people have applied, I think that would be good enough to trust the data.</p>
<p>I’m talking about the schools with high amounts of applicants - between 25 - 75 applicants a year. The schools that it seems " everyone" applies to.</p>
<p>That’s more than enough data to be valid. Use you school’s Naviance GPA numbers.</p>
<p>Use your school’s Naviance -but- don’t overthink this. Student should apply widely.</p>