<p>^ it happens to be a very very nice school, but a bit too small for my daughter.</p>
<p>I looked it up. Too bad I didn’t know about it sooner, we were near there this summer at a tournament. We looked at Lehigh and Villanova that weekend. It’s too small for my D but I bet one of her teammates would love it.</p>
<p>How did you like Lehigh? My daughter loved it.</p>
<p>I loved Lehigh but she actually liked Villanova better. But it could have been the 104 degree heat, the 2 softball games she had already played that day and the hills that did her in lol. It was beyond hot that day. We just walked around on our own but most buildings were open so we got to see a lot. I thought it was a great campus. By the time we made our way up the hill and found the admissions office, we just plopped down and enjoyed the A/C and the free cold water bottles lol.</p>
<p>Her feedback after the tournament…she wants to go back to Villanova open house and Lehigh was too hilly. <em>Sigh</em></p>
<p>Lehigh was very hilly but my daughter did not seem to mind. We will definitely be going back again at some point and she will make it her business to speak with the admissions counselor when they visit our school or the local college fair. On another note, I am looking forward to getting Naviance back again this October.</p>
<p>You know what’s great about this thread? I get to hear about schools that I really know nothing about. I may have heard of them - Villanova and Lehigh, for example - but they aren’t on my radar and maybe should be. It’s both good and bad I suppose, because the “universe” of schools my D and I should be looking at may become unwieldy, but I think at this point more is better.</p>
<p>Soooo…I love to hear about this stuff. I hope more people will share about schools around them that some of us may not know much about. I am in the midwest - Ohio - so if anyone wants the scoop on schools around here and I know anything, I will be happy to share.</p>
<p>I would like her to give it another chance, maybe on a nice cool fall day with no tournament to distract her. She did get a lot of Instagram likes for her pictures of the staircase in the library lol.</p>
<p>We don’t get Naviance access until the spring. That’s one thing I will ask the GC about when they get back to school. I want to use it now.</p>
<p>There may be guest Naviance access? We have access from soph year, though I can access all summer it appears the most recent class’ acceptances haven’t been entered yet.</p>
<p>We have Naviance access, but I’m not sure it does a lot of good since we don’t yet have Junior year grades (or test scores. . . .)</p>
<p>We get Naviance around October first. The school plugs in their GPA but there are no test scores on it yet. I like seeing where the seniors are applying ( and going!) and I think we can still get a lot of info even though there are no test scores. For example- we can see what GPA and test scores kids from our school needed over the past 8 years to get into specific schools that interest us. If nobody from our school ever got into Lehigh with a 27 ACT, it will be seen on Naviance ( for example). My friend used to tell me about the differences in Naviance between schools ie one school may accept kids from HS#1 with a 3.7 or over, while HS#2 may require a 3.8 or higher ( of course there are other variables besides GPA and test scores). That’s why Naviance is great- it’s specific to your school and goes to show you that colleges are aware of the differences between high schools.</p>
<p>We don’t get Naviance. That sounds like something I’d love. Just another one of the perks of having a crappy school.</p>
<p>Our weekly drama is working out a new schedule. My kid’s school used to have only 2 periods that could be used for full year classes, so this is where the AP classes would go. The rest of the periods are 90 minutes and are for 1 semester classes. Although there are some AP classes offered in 1 semester, there aren’t many and it seems like bad idea jeans to take them this way. </p>
<p>My daughter really wanted to take Latin 1 this year, but it’s only offered full year (and it’s virtual) so she didn’t sign up for it. She signed up for Forensics but doesn’t really want to take it. It was just what was available. When she got her schedule, they had put her in AP US History in a 1 semester block because her 2 full year classes were slated for CC English and AP Biology. She found out right before school starts that they are now allowing kids to take 4 full year classes, which means she could have signed up for Latin and made History a full year class.</p>
<p>She put in her request last Thursday and she’s still waiting to find out. Meanwhile, she’s having to follow her old schedule which means she’s taking Trig now instead of in the Spring and she’s missing any classtime for History or Latin, should she get switched in. This also means she’s not paying attention in math, because she wants to believe she won’t be in that class by next week. </p>
<p>The hang up seems to be Latin which has a waiting list, even though it’s a virtual class. If she can’t get that, then she’ll try for AP Europoean History. </p>
<p>I’m sure this was a fascinating read. I just needed to clear my head of the frustration.</p>
<p>You have to be careful using Naviance because it combines multiple years’ data in ways that can obscure trends. E.g., if a school has become more selective in recent years, Naviance might show old admittees with lower GPAs & test scores.</p>
<p>Another potential problem can arise if a HS has substantially changed it’s offerings in ways that affect GPAs. For example, current top GPAs at our HSs are much higher than those of just a few years ago, because our HS has added a handful of AP offerings (APHG, WHAP, AP Psych, APCalcAB, APEngLang, and a bunch of different AP art). This makes it completely unfair to equate the 4.2GPA from 2010 (the kid who got straight As in the toughest available curriculum) to the 2013er with a 4.2GPA (who either got a handful of Bs, or else opted for some “college-prep” as opposed to “honors track” offerings). The problem isn’t just at the top of the scale either, as a kid can now earn a 3.5W GPA either by getting a mix of As and Bs in all regular classes, or by getting many Cs in honors and AP classes – yet those two kids would be viewed very differently by colleges.</p>
<p>^ you bring up some very good points about Naviance. Our HS curriculum has actually gotten more difficult in recent years, as per some dept chairs. The problem with the scatter grams ( if I recall correctly) is that you can’t distinguish acceptances etc from last year versus three years ago. Our school puts the GPA and test score that last years kids had to achieve to gain acceptance, so that’s a start. For example, Lehigh may have 3.9 and 30 on the top of the scatter gram indicating that’s what last years kids BASICALLY needed for acceptance ( this is not real, just an example). It should be noted that there will always be a range. If a school has 3.8 and 29 on the top of the scatter gram, kids still get in with lower stats. When we used Naviance for my older kid it was spot on. Our Naviance also gives us a weighted versus unweighted scatter gram for both the SAT and the ACT.</p>
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<p>D’s GPA is there, I added her PSAT and ACT myself. So she’s on the scatter plots. Presumably her test scores will improve, but it’s still possible to get an idea. Poke around - there is a form where test scores can go though your school may or may not activate it.</p>
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<p>Colleges know the high schools in their area. If S’12 had based his app decisions on the reported GPA/test scores by college web sites he wouldn’t have applied to most of the schools he did apply to (and get into). Sometimes what was accepted from our HS was a .5 difference from the reported average or more.</p>
<p>In addition to the scatter plots, there is a chart that is indeed broken down year by year. So you can see trends form one year to the next, just not visually.</p>
<p>I agree. When my older one applied to schools, the college websites had GPAs that were a bit higher than my daughters. When we visited these schools at the local college fair I was also told that their GPA requirement was a bit higher than what my daughter had ( I did not share her GPA, I was calculating in my head). Meanwhile, she got into all of her schools. Colleges definitely know their high schools.</p>
<p>My D is just hanging out at home this week so she is starting her college search process. Today’s task was to go through all the mail she’s received to see if there are schools that look interesting.</p>
<p>I’m a fan of this method since this was how I found my college.</p>
<p>The other thing that Naviance obscures is all of the things that make a student stand out, since it just shows grades and test scores. Unless you know your school really well, it’s hard to say, oh, those are outliers with low GPAs (or high GPAs) because they’re athletes/legacies/Olympiad team members/etc. . . .</p>
<p>Some schools will put in all of the data, and others will only show data if enough students have applied so that you can’t identify any given data point. Our local high school is quite large, so there’s a lot of data points. The high school my kids have gone to is quite small, so there are very few data points.</p>
<p>And also, sometimes you just look at these things and say, well, approximately one kid is accepted per year, and it’s really hard to distinguish the kid who was accepted from the 5 kids who were rejected with identical (or close) grades and test scores. Looking at the whole application, I might be able to tell, but not just from Naviance.</p>
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<p>Very true. But when I see a cluster of accepted dots and one or two dots way outside of that cluster, I assume some kind of major hook.</p>
<p>It is oddly comforting to see D’s dot above or deep in the accepted cluster :)</p>
<p>Hi, All!</p>
<p>I’m new here, but thought I’d join in now that S13 is packing to leave for his freshman year at Georgetown and it is time to think about S15 entering the application fray…CC and the old NYT blog were very helpful as we navigated the application cycle for my first child. I didn’t participate much on CC with S13, but I thought I’d come out of lurkervile and try to participate in the forum that was so helpful to us.</p>
<p>S15 completed SAT prep classes in the spring of 2013. He took the SAT in June and did fairly well. Hopefully, that has prepared him for the upcoming PSAT. Junior year is so difficult with AP classes and extracurriculars…we try to get all of the testing completed by October of junior year and then forget about it!</p>