At my district’s local public high schools, Naviance data goes back to 2009. In the world of college admissions these days, those figures may as well be from 1970! (OK, exaggerating, but you get the point).
College admissions standards have changed drastically since 2009. Looking at the “Application History” section on our Naviance, schools that were admitting 60-80 kids from this high school were down to 20-30 in 2014, and 2015 looks to be an even worse bloodbath. Highly selective schools are the most inaccurate. For example, at this school, Stanford accepted 15/80 applicants in 2009. In 2014, Stanford accepted 1 of over 100 applicants.
While the Application History is indeed useful to show the historical trend, the scattergram graph lumps all years together. Therefore, an applicant looking at Stanford, for example, is told that the average accepted ACT from this high school is 31 and the average weighted gpa is 3.95, when of course this is far from the truth today. Yes, you can glean from the Application History that the scattergram is going to be skewed due to past years, but there is no way to tell how far off it is.
Here is my question: is Naviance capable of being adjusted by the district to allow a user to filter out prior years and look at a scattergram from, say, just the past year or two? Or is this function simply not available on Naviance?
I am thinking about approaching the school district to ask them to adjust the functionality for users, but I would like to know in advance if this is even possible with Naviance. With the college admissions landscape changing so rapidly, and given the expense of having to apply to so many schools, I think it’s very important for students to have a current, accurate, useful way of gauging “fits.” Yes, they can look at the common data set and evaluate all sorts of information out there, but knowing how YOUR high school has been received by colleges is a valuable piece of the puzzle that Naviance was intended to offer.