As you know, we use quantitative factors such as admission rates, test scores, and GPA to drive how schools are categorized in College Kickstart.
While this approach has allowed us to provide you the “hard data” to better manage expectations with students and parents, it does not account for qualitative factors that can affect admissibility such as applicant hooks, fit and demonstrated interest. There are also occasional judgment calls that need to be made on the quantitative side, such as when GPAs and test scores are inconsistent for a student or when a particularly competitive major has been selected and departmental admissions data isn’t available.
To address these situations, we’ve developed a Counselor Adjustment capability to give you ultimate control over how schools should be categorized for a student in College Kickstart. We hope you’ll find this handy as you work towards finalizing plans with your students this fall.
The Basics
- An adjustment list will be kept for each student in the counselor dashboard.
- The adjustment list tracks how a school has been categorized by College Kickstart, your adjustment and the reason for that adjustment.
- Adjustments persist from the time you’ve made the adjustment to the time you delete the adjustment.
- Adjustments will be noted both in the web application and in the personalized plan PDFs you generate for your students.
How to Make an Adjustment from the Counselor Dashboard
From the counselor dashboard, click on the adjustment icon () under Actions for the student you wish to make an adjustment for. This will bring up the Counselor Adjustments modal:
The modal shows you the student’s current list of schools in rank order, how College Kickstart has categorized each school.
1. To make an adjustment, first click on the checkbox in the Adjust? column for the school you want to recategorize.
2. After clicking the checkbox, the Adjustment, Primary Reason, and Keep Private columns will populate with dropdowns and a checkbox.
3. The dropdown in the Adjustment column will have four options. Select the category you wish to recategorize the school to.
4. Next, in the Primary Reason column, select the reason for recategorizing the school.
5. If you wish to keep the reason for the adjustment private, make sure the checkbox in the the Keep Private column is checked. This will indicate to the student that there was an adjustment, but not the specific reason for the adjustment. If you uncheck the box in the Keep Private column, the reason for the adjustment will also be mentioned with the adjustment. To see how adjustments are shown to students, read more in the How Adjustments are Communicated to Students section.
6. Finally, to save your adjustments, click on the SAVE CHANGES button in the bottom right of the panel. College Kickstart will automatically rerun the plan to reflect your adjustments. So the next time you or your student runs the plan, schools with adjustments will always be categorized to what you set in the Counselor Adjustments panel.
If you create any adjustments for schools and the student decides they want to remove the schools from their list, your adjustments will still be saved in case any of the schools are added back to the student's list. Unused adjustments will appear underneath the student's current list of schools.
How to Make an Adjustment when Creating Plans
You can also make adjustments directly inside the core College Kickstart application by clicking on the adjustment icon () at the bottom of the graphic in the List Check tab:
How to Remove an Adjustment
An adjustment remains in effect for the student until it is removed. To remove an adjustment for a school, uncheck the checkbox in the Adjust column and click Save Changes.
How Adjustments are Communicated to Students
Counselor adjustments will noted in various parts of our application.
After Running Kickstart:
- In the List Check tab, counselor adjustments are notated with an asterisk. Hovering over the asterisk will reveal additional commentary.
- Adjustments are also mentioned in the Details tab:
Summary View
- Adjustments are notated with an asterisk in the Summary View.
In Personalized Plan PDFs:
- Adjustments are notated with an asterisk in the List Check and Plan Summary pages of the personalized plan PDF.