Anonymous wrote:I know the Common Data Set provides the overall numbers for a school, but what calculator to people think is most accurate when you enter a kids’ profile? My kid likely has a better than 5% chance of getting into Vanderbilt being at the 75th percentile for SAT and grades/rigor/ECs, but I don’t know if that number is more like 10% or 20%. The reason for asking is to be more thoughtful about the number of reaches for my kid to apply to.

Some people in previous threads have mentioned CollegeVine. Are there others that are good?

The last time I had a free but password-protected Niche.com account, I had access to admissions scattergrams broken down by intended major.

Niche got the data by offered participation in a drawing to people who asked-reported their majors, schools and scores.

People here laugh at Niche, but my child’s school had no useful Naviance data.

I thought the Niche scattergrams were really useful for showing, for example, why it was insane for students who love reading and writing and had humanities activities to tell schools that they wanted to be premeds or CS or business majors. (At many selective schools below the HYPS level, getting in as a would-be history major was just so much easier.)

Anonymous wrote:we used combination of naviance and collegevine, which was quite accurate. coming from boston suburb public, admit rates are much higher for neu, bu, tufts, mit, and harvard than for schools outside of boston area. our school does poorly with brown, penn, and duke.

Yes. People don't understand that there is a strong regional component for each IVY. NJ/PA for Pton. NY/NJ/CT for columbia. PA, and Philly specifically for Penn. Dartmouth is New England heavy (VT. Nh. Maine).

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Vanderbilt adores high SAT's. Pre-covid, pre-TO it had one of the highest SAT averages.

At the 1560 level they are trying to get as many of these scorers to apply. It is simply a numbers game. There are not that many 1560 scorers left after Ivy + colleges take them. Many of the high scorers are poor international students so the pot of 1560 scorer that Vanderbilt draws from is small.

Living in the past. Vandy admissions has changed a lot since Covid and they give tons of seats to kids with no test scores.

Agree. I think Vandy is more nuanced in that they don't want to see a lower score not that they won't take one. If they see it, they have to report it.

When deciding whether our kid should apply to a school I used school Naviance data and mapped out result for every applicant within .1 GPA and 20 Points on SAT or 1 point on ACT.
So I could see that of the 20 kids within my kid's stat range 8 were admitted (40%).

Anonymous wrote:Your school counselor.

I'd be wary of the school college counselor, even at privates, where they have about 30 kids per counselor. The counselor is working for the school, not for your child. In the event that the school priorities are not aligned with your child's, guess what priority they will choose? In our experience, the counselor totally lowballed the type of colleges DC could get in to and tried to convince him to apply for lesser schools than he would have been able to get in to with his SAT, GPA and ECs- DC had a 1550+ SAT, 4.0 unweighted GPA from a good private, maxed out on math rigor, had excellent ECs, and the school college counselor told him that schools like GW and Drexel (acceptance rate 90%) were targets. Thankfully we did not listen to him and DC is at at T20 now.
The school may not want to risk too many rejections, and they also want to say x% of our kids got into one of their top 3 choices.
If you can afford it, hire a good independent college counselor, preferably from freshman year so they can also guide you on a smart choice of ECs and class selection.

Anonymous wrote:Vanderbilt adores high SAT's. Pre-covid, pre-TO it had one of the highest SAT averages.

At the 1560 level they are trying to get as many of these scorers to apply. It is simply a numbers game. There are not that many 1560 scorers left after Ivy + colleges take them. Many of the high scorers are poor international students so the pot of 1560 scorer that Vanderbilt draws from is small.

Living in the past. Vandy admissions has changed a lot since Covid and they give tons of seats to kids with no test scores.

Vanderbilt adores high SAT's. Pre-covid, pre-TO it had one of the highest SAT averages.

At the 1560 level they are trying to get as many of these scorers to apply. It is simply a numbers game. There are not that many 1560 scorers left after Ivy + colleges take them. Many of the high scorers are poor international students so the pot of 1560 scorer that Vanderbilt draws from is small.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Naviance/SCOIR

Particularly for schools like Vandy which have a preference for certain private schools.

It's hard to say that school's prefer high scores when close to half the class is accepted without scores (as is the case at Vandy).

Which affords the OP's child who got a 1560 that much higher of a chance at admission. The 1560 is a definite advantage. Around 12,000 score that number or higher in the entire world. Of these, how many apply to Vanderbilt?

In Vanderbilt's entire freshman class only 111 freshman scored 1560 or higher. This out of 1,630 freshman overall.

Really!?! That's pretty mid

They’re denying tons of kids with higher scores to arrive at that number.

we used combination of naviance and collegevine, which was quite accurate. coming from boston suburb public, admit rates are much higher for neu, bu, tufts, mit, and harvard than for schools outside of boston area. our school does poorly with brown, penn, and duke.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Naviance/SCOIR

Particularly for schools like Vandy which have a preference for certain private schools.

It's hard to say that school's prefer high scores when close to half the class is accepted without scores (as is the case at Vandy).

Which affords the OP's child who got a 1560 that much higher of a chance at admission. The 1560 is a definite advantage. Around 12,000 score that number or higher in the entire world. Of these, how many apply to Vanderbilt?

In Vanderbilt's entire freshman class only 111 freshman scored 1560 or higher. This out of 1,630 freshman overall.

Are you interpreting this as therefore 1560+ must be rare and highly sought-after at Vanderbilt?

You could also interpret it the complete opposite way: that this means Vandy doesn’t care about the difference between 1500 and 1560 therefore only 111 of there 1630 admits have 1560+.

You could use some SAT prep.

Math or Reading/Writing?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Naviance/SCOIR

Particularly for schools like Vandy which have a preference for certain private schools.

It's hard to say that school's prefer high scores when close to half the class is accepted without scores (as is the case at Vandy).

Which affords the OP's child who got a 1560 that much higher of a chance at admission. The 1560 is a definite advantage. Around 12,000 score that number or higher in the entire world. Of these, how many apply to Vanderbilt?

In Vanderbilt's entire freshman class only 111 freshman scored 1560 or higher. This out of 1,630 freshman overall.

Are you interpreting this as therefore 1560+ must be rare and highly sought-after at Vanderbilt?

You could also interpret it the complete opposite way: that this means Vandy doesn’t care about the difference between 1500 and 1560 therefore only 111 of there 1630 admits have 1560+.

You could use some SAT prep.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Naviance/SCOIR

Particularly for schools like Vandy which have a preference for certain private schools.

It's hard to say that school's prefer high scores when close to half the class is accepted without scores (as is the case at Vandy).

Which affords the OP's child who got a 1560 that much higher of a chance at admission. The 1560 is a definite advantage. Around 12,000 score that number or higher in the entire world. Of these, how many apply to Vanderbilt?

In Vanderbilt's entire freshman class only 111 freshman scored 1560 or higher. This out of 1,630 freshman overall.

Are you interpreting this as therefore 1560+ must be rare and highly sought-after at Vanderbilt?

You could also interpret it the complete opposite way: that this means Vandy doesn’t care about the difference between 1500 and 1560 therefore only 111 of there 1630 admits have 1560+.