If you are a student at East, you’ve most likely heard of Naviance. On Naviance, students can find their GPA, class rank, and other academic related information. While Naviance can be useful throughout a student’s entire academic career, it becomes an essential part of junior and senior year if students plan on attending college. Naviance is a tool that provides students necessary information for college. It is where students can request their transcripts, letters of recommendations and sign up for college visits. Additionally, it provides graphs that show the stats of other students in the past and whether they got accepted, rejected, waitlisted, etc from a school.

While Naviance is a great tool to see one’s chances to get accepted to a school, it should not divert students from applying to their dream school. Naviance is a great asset to provide information, however, it can be overused and cause stress if students spend too much time on the website. While searching for colleges, students may see students that their stats in a sea of red x’s indicating that people with similar scores have gotten rejected. Other times one may feel that they are a shoe in to a school because they are surrounded by a sea of green.

While it is important to be realistic and realize that GPA and SAT scores matter, there are many other factors that go into an application that cannot be captured by a single graph. Naviance does not take into account a student’s personal statement, or supplemental essays. In addition, Naviance does not take into account students’ extracurricular activities, jobs, or letters of recommendation. The college process is extremely holistic and has an element of randomness to it so students should be very careful with simply basing their decisions off of statistics.

With a drastically different school year for many students across the nation, the requirements for testing have changed. Many schools have gone test optional because of the lack of available testing centers and dates available. With test optional options, other factors of applicants will be weighted more heavily. Therefore, just because someone with similar statistics of the past did not get in does not mean that students have no chance and vice versa. Naviance should be a contributor in your decision-making, but should not be the only factor. It is extremely important for students to focus on all aspects of their application, not just the statistics shown on Naviance.