By Beza Kifle
As seniors rush to submit their college applications due to the upcoming deadlines, juniors officially started their college search process when the counselors introduced them to Scoir during an assembly period.
I talked to Ms. Hua, the director of College Counseling, who said Scoir is the “software for college search and application processes.” It allows the counselors to keep track of what students are doing, especially during their senior year.
Currently, Scoir is only offered to the seniors and the juniors. Ms. Hua mentioned that it’s possible underclassmen will have access sometime in the future.
“We haven’t always had the staff to introduce Scoir to every grade, but we are thinking about offering it to the sophomores because some of the information is great for when they start touring colleges,” she said.
Last year, Scoir was connected to a program called YouScience, which allows students to take different kinds of assessments, including for aptitude, career, and personality.
Scoir also has a feature that directly lets students apply to college, but Ms. Hua doesn’t recommend that just yet. “I think the thing that we don’t like about it right now is that there are some pre-filled parts of the application that you can’t change,” she said.
According to Ms. Hua, current seniors use Scoir a bit less than she’d like to admit “because they move onto the Common Application, which is where they actually apply to colleges,” she told me. The seniors use Scoir more for tracking their transcripts, letters of recommendation, updating their list, and other documents.
They have also been using it to figure out some last-minute information. “If a student was trying to figure out if they were going to be test-optional to a specific college, they might go there to look for the admission information about admitted students,” Ms. Hua told me. Scoir provides information about the school’s GPA, ACT, and SAT stats, and this can help a student make that decision during the application process.
Lovett has been using Scoir for several years now. Before, we used a platform called Naviance. “We found it to be a little outdated, expired, and clunky,” she explained. She did tell me that Naviance was great for when she had to report things to Ms. Cole about how everything was going and what the trends were with the seniors. “It was much more user-friendly than Scoir, but students don’t see that part,” she explained. “Scoir is a much better fit for having our students engage with college research.”
Still, the college counselors are always submitting feature requests to Scoir. Ms. Hua told me that when Scoir first started out, it was smaller and run by a board of college counselors. But as it has grown, she feels it has lost “its community feel in terms of what college counselors want to see and want to support their students.”
One notable feature of Scoir is the scattergram, which allows students to see the stats of previous Lovett students at a specific university if historically there were enough students who applied there.
The scattergram is supposed to be a tool to give students context for the admissions process, but it needs to be used while having a conversation with your college counselor. “The hope is that students will look at the scattergrams and get some questions ready, and have a meeting with their college counselors,” Ms. Hua told me. She said that the scattergrams can help students find balance for the college list but with some assistance.
My fellow reporter Keya Nijhawan and I were looking at the scattergram of Northeastern University, and we were horrified to see a previous Lovett student who had a 97 GPA and a 34 ACT, who was rejected.
I mentioned this to Ms. Hua, who told me that schools and their acceptance rates are different now because they have been changing their requirements. “In 2018, that same student might have gotten the presidential scholarship, and now they’re getting rejected,” she explained.
Since juniors were introduced to Scoir last week, I asked some of them what they thought about it so far.
Chelsea Daniel told me that “it’s definitely super intimidating because it makes me hyperaware that we’re going to start our college process, but it’s also kind of fun.” Chelsea is aspiring towards her dream university, Yale, but when she looked for the scattergram, there wasn’t one because not enough Lovett students have applied there.
Pierce Daniel said that he’s only looked at it once since the introduction. “I think that it was helpful with showing what scholarships are available to me, but I already knew because I get emails from colleges,” he told me. He hasn’t looked at the scattergram yet, which I thought was surprising because everyone’s been talking about it.
For Virginia Jane Hultgren, Scoir is a really cool tool that lets you see where your stats fit in at specific schools. “Some of the schools that I’m looking at are a little more niche because of swimming, and they don’t have as much data,” she told me. Virginia Jane explained that it’s more helpful when you’re looking at schools with more data, but it has a lot of information to take into account.
In the meantime, juniors have to fill out a (really long) survey in order to set up their first meetings with their college counselors. survey is intended to help counselors get to know students better and to help them write the counselor recommendation letters that students will need during their application process.
While things are just getting started for juniors, before we know it, we’ll be just like the seniors, hitting the “submit” button on our applications and becoming new dots on the Scoir scattergrams.
