In our experience this year, Naviance was totally off. I will not trust it at all for my other kids. The entire college admissions landscape changed this year with the shift to test optional. Everything is different now, rendering the Naviance data kind of obsolete (IMHO). From what our family has seen, for the competitive colleges, we are now in a world where super-high GPAs reign.
Just to provide one example, Naviance showed our state flagship as a “safety” school for my child. When you look at the scattergram, it is entirely green checkmarks for kids in my child’s range, absolutely no denials anywhere close to the range. My child’s HS consistently has 40-50 admitted to this school every year, and my child is towards the top of the class. And yet my child was waitlisted.
It seems like schools are taking about half the class from the test optional pool, so if you’re one who submitted a test (like my child), you’re competing with other high test scorers. The true advantage this year went to the kids who have very high GPAs but are not good test takers, who went test optional.
For us, it is all fine because my child doesn’t want to go to this state flagship, but it was an eye-opener. I’ve heard similar stories from many other Senior parents this year. Just be aware that things in the college admission game have really, REALLY changed. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto!