Question: Assessing Matches, Reaches and Probables using Naviance

TooOld4School
Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:34:31 +0000

I would ignore the overall schools acceptance rate because the cluster indicated your schools localized rate with your child’s scores. EC’s apply the same way, they are almost always secondary to the GPA/Test scores unless they are something extraordinary or completely lacking. The common data set will give an indication of how each school values the different categories.

There aren’t any hard percentages when it come to match, but I would use the visual Naviance information. So if your child’s scores are in the middle of the cluster and the EC’s are average, you have a match. When you get to the area with rejections, you are in the reach area.

The safety-match-reach strategy is pretty sound :increase the likelihood of being accepted at a ‘reach’ school while minimizing the risk of being rejected by all schools. This happened to one of my son’s friends - he had 2400, 4.0 GPA at a known prep school, won national science competitions and still was rejected at PSCM etc. He made the mistake of not applying to any safety schools (UMich is our state flagship- a safety for him). We were all shocked.