As fall arrives, seniors around the country need to balance essays, letters of recommendation, and classes as they prepare to submit their college applications. The process is tedious and lengthy, which leaves the question: What does it look like at Lexington High School?

For many years, LHS has used the platform Naviance for both the college search and application process. However, frequent glitches on Naviance made an already stressful process even more difficult for the 600+ seniors applying to colleges. This year, LHS has transitioned from Naviance to Scoir, which overall has been much more efficient and beneficial for both students and teachers. Scoir differs from Naviance in small yet impactful ways that make it easier to navigate.

“There’s been a lot of districts in the area who have transitioned over to Scoir. We did some demos of it. I felt like it was more user-friendly,” Stacy McFadden, a counselor at LHS, said. 

A drawback that many students and teachers found with Naviance was its storage limitations for large file uploads, such as recommendation letters. Scoir, however, does not possess the same storage-related issues and is therefore regarded as more efficient for uploading several recommendation letters at a time.

“It took a while for the letter to attach. Scoir is much faster. If your PDF of the letter has a certain amount of memory, it would take [up more time]. Scoir seems to have a higher capacity for memory,” Joshua Oliver-Mason, an English teacher at LHS, said.

Additionally, students have found that Scoir’s synchronization feature—which directly connects the platform to the Common Application—facilitates the college search process.

“[Scoir] makes requesting recommendation letters super simple because it syncs with the Common App,” Aviv Rolnick, a senior at LHS, said.

While Naviance frequently had issues, contacting its customer support was simpler and more direct compared to Scoir’s help-request system. Many of Naviance’s issues could be solved over a phone call. 

“Occasionally, there was a problem that [the Naviance support line] couldn’t help with, but that was very unusual. Scoir is almost exclusively emailing [to contact customer support]; it [was] hard to get someone on the phone,” Jane Aronson, assistant to the registrar, said. 

With a large number of seniors, Naviance’s more efficient support system was regarded as more ideal for students and staff alike.

However, although switching from a longstanding platform to a new one took time and patience, the switch from Naviance to Scoir was much-needed and has ultimately benefited the school.