What Do Admission Officials Know About Applicants' High Schools?

[tdy123]

@curiousme2

Do colleges have access to Naviance scattergrams, or otherwise maintain their own database of past applicants from each high school, to put GPA’s/scores into context? Especially if a high school only sends a few applications to a particular college each year, will that college look at data points from past years as well?

What about colleges that say they don’t compare applicants against others from the same high school?

The colleges don’t need to look at Naviance to place the students within the context of their HS. Along with the transcript, the high school attaches a school profile which includes test by test (and section by section) breakdowns on SAT, ACT SATII and AP scores at the HS, as well as detailed information on courses taken and grade distributions. Most profiles also include prior year information on college enrollments or acceptances.

I’m not aware of any highly selective schools that say they don’t compare applicants against others from the same HS. For schools that are less selective, or not selective at all, why would they need to?