What is Naviance?

[Anonymous]

My child isn't college aged yet but I'm just curious about Naviance since it is often mentioned on this forum. What is it? Yes, I already googled it. Just looking for a parent or guidance counselor explanation.

[Anonymous]

its a data tracking system that allows a secondary school to see where their graduates have applied, and been accepted to, college. It will show graphs by college or university, and show you the GPA's and test scores of kids who have applied and how they fared in the process. For students and parents, it works as a search tool as well, allowing you to build a profile and keep track of schools you like and your resume, etc. It's awesome. (Signed, Former Guidance Counselor)

[Anonymous]

It's a service that provides HS-specific data on college admissions outcomes. Basically x% of the kids from with HS with SATs from a-b and GPAs of c-d who applied to College Q over the past 5 years were accepted.

I believe the HS (or school district) has to sign up for the service and that, typically, larger (more affluent?) public schools/systems do and privates don't.

[Anonymous]

It's the computer program that many schools help to administer college applications.

The most useful part are the "Scattergrams."

At my son's school, there is a graph for every college where at least 5 kids have applied over the last 5 years. The x axis is standardized test scores, the y axis is GPA. And then all the points on the graph have symbols that denote whether the anonymous student with (for example) a 2200 SAT and 3.8 GPA was accepted, declined, or wait listed.

It's a quick visual reference to see how the raw numbers of applicants from your school translate to admissions outcomes at every college. Lots of times you can figure out who the very top kids are, and who the athletics recruits are.

[Anonymous]

In addition to the scattergrams, you can see how many applied, how many were accepted and how many actually went for the past 5 years for each school. That was helpful too.

There is quite a bit of information about each college on it too- for the initial investigations.

[Anonymous]

If your school (district?) has it, when are parents able to view scattergrams, data, etc.? Is it only for parents of high school juniors and seniors?

[Anonymous]

OP here. Very interesting. So is the info only from students in the same HS or all students' info?

[Anonymous]

Naviance can be very misleading because it's so narrowly focused on GPA and test scores. For all 3 of our kids, Naviance data suggested that they'd never get into the schools they ended up going to. According to the scattergram, they were beyond reaches. I'm not saying that Naviance data isn't helpful, but I'd caution folks from relying too heavily on it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If your school (district?) has it, when are parents able to view scattergrams, data, etc.? Is it only for parents of high school juniors and seniors?

In FCPS, beginning of sophomore year, once your child has a year's worth of grades in the database. You can access it through blackboard, then click on Family Connection- then click on the colleges tab at the top. It won't say "Naviance",but "Hobson's, Inc".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If your school (district?) has it, when are parents able to view scattergrams, data, etc.? Is it only for parents of high school juniors and seniors?

In FCPS, beginning of sophomore year, once your child has a year's worth of grades in the database. You can access it through blackboard, then click on Family Connection- then click on the colleges tab at the top. It won't say "Naviance",but "Hobson's, Inc".

I will add that the SAT part will not mean as much for the current rising Juniors and below since they will have a different SAT.

[Anonymous]

Does Naviance only use sample sizes from the school to whom it is licensed?

Finding out that 4 students from last year's graduating class got into XYZ State University might be interesting, but how much can you really learn from such a small sample size?

You can get freshman profile data directly from the schools themselves.

I do appreciate that people using Naviance are at least savvy-enough not to just go by the "acceptance rate," which paints an incomplete picture.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does Naviance only use sample sizes from the school to whom it is licensed?

Finding out that 4 students from last year's graduating class got into XYZ State University might be interesting, but how much can you really learn from such a small sample size?

You can get freshman profile data directly from the schools themselves.

I do appreciate that people using Naviance are at least savvy-enough not to just go by the "acceptance rate," which paints an incomplete picture.

It's always better with more data points of course. Our school has 450-500 in a grade and they use data for the last 3 or maybe 5 years so there are usually a decent number of data points for each school.

The benefit of naviance is that it shows each individual data point so you don't lose some of the nuances in the averages that are presented on the freshman profiles. And it is also specific to your schools grading approach, demographics, etc. We could look at it with weighted GPAs and regular GPAs so you could get a sense of the rigor of the courses of accepted applicants. We found that the Naviance stats for our school to be much more competitive than the freshman profile stats - in other words while it looked like my DC would be a very strong candidate based on freshman profile stats, that was not the case when looking at results for DCs school.

[Anonymous]

Being at a private with only about 90 seniors, I found the small sample size very helpful because - at least for the highly selective schools - I can pretty much figure out who a lot of the applicants are. If, for example, you know the #2 person in the class got waitlisted at Stanford, you can make note of her test scores (and GPA) from that Scattegram and then track her other results to see that she got into Brown and also waitlisted at Harvard. Once you can ID a few kids, it becomes very helpful for getting a broad strokes picture of your kid's chances based on the last couple of years' worth of admissions decisions.

Quite honestly, seeing the multiple HYPS wait list decisions for last year's #1 student (whose Scattergram everyone could instantly ID because it was the top GPA in the class and he had a perfect ACT) was very powerful in getting my rising senior to take seriously the task of coming up with match and likely schools he would actually be happy to attend. If Mr. #1 wasn't gliding into these schools, it made him fully comprehend that he might not be either.

[Anonymous]

Keep in mind though. Some of the data are self-reported by the students and, therefore, not very reliable

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Naviance can be very misleading because it's so narrowly focused on GPA and test scores. For all 3 of our kids, Naviance data suggested that they'd never get into the schools they ended up going to. According to the scattergram, they were beyond reaches. I'm not saying that Naviance data isn't helpful, but I'd caution folks from relying too heavily on it.

What was your hook?