Well unfortunately ds’ score was posted for the ACT this morning but he did not get the 1 point he really wanted to open up a few scholarship doors. I feel badly for him because he’s disappointed but keep telling him a 32 is an amazing score and he is going to have amazing options when it comes time to choose his school. We are done testing though so we are both relieved about that.
@Collegecue …sorry about the one point! When you are getting to those tippy top scores I think it can be sooo very hard!! It is easy for these kids to lose sight and forget that they are way above the national average! A 26-28 on the ACT seems to be the norm for most high achieving, solid student kids around here and they are very happy with the score.
I think our kids are relieved when we tell them “enough.” D is on a quest for that elusive one more point too and we have told her “no more.” She was so relieved she emptied the office of all the test prep books!
@RightCoaster I’m paranoid about the Naviance charts, even when we see the big blotch of green in the upper right corner. Our son appears to have been the first one ever to be waitlisted or rejected from one particular school when his stats were in that area. It’s easy to pick out his WL even with tons of data points. I’m not quite sure how much risk to take with kid 2 because there should be several schools where he’ll be in the big green blotch, so one of them should come through you’d think. But for any one school, there seems to be enough randomness in the system to make me a bit nervous.
I envy those of you who can discern anything from the Naviance graphs. We have a fairly large public HS, and the graphs look like a Jackson Pollock painting. I wish you could layer certain stats (like EA vs. ED) separately, or make the graph larger/zoom in.
@RightCoaster Keep in mind that this board (and CC in general) is skewed very high. I know it’s easy to say your son’s GPA/ACT are average but they are not they are still significantly better than average. They are certainly better than my S17’s.
@stlarenas Ohhh… that doesn’t sound like a good plan to have one new counselor in charge of 400 seniors. I imagine you are going to need to be on top of that. I was getting irritated that we have a all new admin in charge of the college & career center. Plus 1/2 the counseling staff are brand new. Everything is a bit behind because of this. Our H.S. purposly gives divides each grade amount the counselors because dealing with seniors in the fall for college apps take a lot of work during the fall, and it better spread among the counseling staff than concentrated on one person.
@curiositycat333 thanks, I know he is a good student and am proud of him. We just know a lot of good students. I also know a lot of not so good students too 
@stlarenas good luck, I think you made the right decision to contact the new GC. Hopefully she helps your daighter out in her search.
@rtidwell on our naviance, the big schools like Umass, UNH, Uconn etc are covered with too many dots to really get info. But just try to see if your kid’s circle in surrounded by green dots to see if your kid stands a chance. On our naviance the schools with lower acceptance rates have fewer data points clogging it all up. Northeastern is a weird exception because it has gotten tougher to get into and still a lot of kids apply. So there a lot of dots and it’s hard to make any clear opinion on chances.
@Collegecue bummer about son’s one point, but I don’t think there will be much difference between 32 and 33. He has a great score. He’ll end up somewhere great.
For all those discussing whether Naviance data is reliable or not, I’ll just remind that many (most?) of us parents out there don’t have even that to work with…
I’m starting to think the cost of college cannot usurp the cost of being a senior in high school.
^^^^^ Yep!
Me to GC “… Do we have access to Naviance?”
GC: “What’s Naviance??”
@carachel2 that’s not a confidence inspiring response, lol.
If you want me to check your kids stats vs the data from our school, please let me know. At least you’d have something to baseline against.
That offer stand for everyone, if you need more comparables against Naviance I’d be glad to help out.
I’m happy to do the same.
@CT1417 I think the other thing that threw D17 off about the crowd around the Tufts rep was that it was largely comprised of kids she didn’t like, including one she refers to as Jerky McJerkface, lol. Maybe in a calmer moment, we will revisit, but at the moment, the best response seemed to be “there are lots of great schools, don’t worry about it.” The gut reaction, as you say.
@mamaedefamilia As to the engineering thing… yeah. Sigh. Now she’s saying that she was feeling pressured into being interested in that because of various well-meaning adults in her life who kept telling her she should want it because she’s good at science and math and because it would give her a competitive advantage. She’s still planning on applying to a few schools that offer engineering (SUNY Stony Brook - our closest to home option, RIT - where D’s close friend goes, Smith, and Swarthmore, plus Haverford has that 4+1) but she’s backed off it as a critical criteria.
One thing I’m looking at now to focus on is which schools will superscore her ACT - because that takes her from 33 to 35. As an utterly unhooked suburban white girl applying to LACs, I figure she can use every point she can get!
I am willing to check Naviance data as well to help anyone but I do warn you each graduating class is about 60-80 students so the numbers are very LOW!!!
Re: sharing Naviance data, Just keep in mind that high schools calculate GPA in all sorts of different ways, which may make one HS’s Naviance data possibly irrelevant for another HS.
It appears no one talks about Naviance or NMSF at DS’s school
We do not have Naviance but NMSF and Commended are all over the website and FB feeds.
We have Naviance, but still not a word about commended scholars. Or Semi Finalists. And Naviance hasn’t been all that helpful this time around. Strangely many of the schools graphs are “not available” citing privacy due to limited applicants. Which would be fine, if the candidate pools weren’t fairly large and other graphs with far smaller applicants are available. I suspect there’s something amiss here.
I was just playing around with the FAFSA, is it really that hard to fill out? I went through as much as I could and it did not seem that bad. I am sure I wasn’t doing something right.
QOTD- do you plan to fill out the FAFSA?
@thermom Might her reaction be more centered around type of student than size of student body? My kids tend to want to be in a more collaborative environment than cut-throat one upmanship.
I would strongly suggest sitting in some college classrooms and watching the dynamics during classes to get a feel for a campus. For more enlightening than info sessions.
@jeepgirl FAFSA is not hard to fill out. The CSS profile, otoh, is.