'Everything has improved — there’s so much functionality on Cialfo.'

Data-driven success

‘To have this sort of data ... that's very specific to your high school, provides an incredibly direct and relevant counseling value for each student.

Any counselor knows how important application and admissions results are. For the previous school year, Miller and his colleagues collected and recorded the graduating cohort's application results on Cialfo. 'We were able to produce a couple of really interesting reports. Overall, the number of applications per student increased a huge amount, and the number of acceptances per student also increased a huge amount,' Miller tells us.

The Reports that counselors and school leaders can generate on Cialfo are unlike any other, and provide a level of insight that greatly helps both counselors and students alike. ‘Teachers have test data, but they don’t have test data that is connected with application results, and so for us to see that was very very revealing,' Miller explains. 'There is a Reports function on Cialfo called Score Profiles that takes every single school to which students were accepted and for each school, it gives us three data points: the lowest, average and highest accepted ACT scores. It also has the number of students accepted for that university. To have that kind of data for next year … especially in such an environment as China where everyone’s hyper rankings-focused, to have that kind of Score Profile for each university that’s specific to our high school, provides an incredibly direct and relevant counseling value for each student.’

'Having access to important pieces of data and having it organized in a way that maintains the quality of that data ...

Ease and accessibility like no other

'It's not just the platform — there's also Cialfo Community, there's the great customer service, it's bilingual ... the list goes on and on.'

For daily counseling and administrative tasks, Cialfo has proved invaluable to Miller and his team. ‘In a meeting with a student, we’ll update test scores, we’ll give them feedback on their [extracurricular] activity descriptions, we’ll look over their school list,' he explains. 'Having it all on Cialfo means that you don’t have to remember it all, you don’t have to go find a student’s Excel sheet or some document somewhere — it’s all right there, and it’s very easy to navigate. It just makes finding information convenient.’

This is a stark contrast to how things were before Cialfo, when the team relied on Excel spreadsheets that were hard to keep track of and unnecessarily complicated to manage. Miller was pull of praise for Cialfo's many features: 'It's not just the platform — there's also Cialfo Community, there's the great customer service, it's bilingual ... the list goes on and on.'

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Image credits: Francis Miller and the Xi'an Tieyi High School