How reliable is Naviance?

[Anonymous]

It's a helpful tool in the grand scheme of things but a lot of variables and context to consider (many mentioned already). Don't take it as gospel.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Naviance works well if you have an average child. Not so well if you have a 1570 SAT and you are applying to elites from a competitive school. It honestly feels like a crapshoot

This isn’t true either. Just because the reach or target level is different doesn’t mean Naviance is more accurate at the “average” level. And any school that has less than a 20% acceptance rate is a crapshoot, with or without the gpa and sat data.

NP. This is an important point, that low acceptance rate schools are reaches for all, no matter what your scattergram says. Too often in this forum posters swear by the backward-looking scattergrams to define their reach/match/safety categories and that is inappropriate, in my opinion.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Naviance works well if you have an average child. Not so well if you have a 1570 SAT and you are applying to elites from a competitive school. It honestly feels like a crapshoot

This isn’t true either. Just because the reach or target level is different doesn’t mean Naviance is more accurate at the “average” level. And any school that has less than a 20% acceptance rate is a crapshoot, with or without the gpa and sat data.

NP. This is an important point, that low acceptance rate schools are reaches for all, no matter what your scattergram says. Too often in this forum posters swear by the backward-looking scattergrams to define their reach/match/safety categories and that is inappropriate, in my opinion.

I agree. When I looked at our school (smallish private) I forced myself to ignore any odd acceptances to the left. Our school does not remove legacy, athletic recruits etc so no way to know what explains those but I knew my kid was unhooked and whatever it was didn't apply. I did find the data consistent with top tier college's CDS in that for our school at least the kids who got in (including mine) were in the top 10% of the class and were in the SAT range. Of course they didn't all get in, presumably essays, EC's, recommendations and intended major are the tie breakers. If you look at the data in percentile (your school's profile should have that by GPA) and compare it that way you may be able to tease a better guestimate of what your DC's chances are.