See this article on the trend not to calculate or release class rank:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/07/13/high-schools-are-doing-away-with-class-rank-what-does-that-mean-for-college-admissions/?utm_term=.e1e40a6bb3e4
I think that data on collegedata.com is old. It’s very possibly accurate, but only so as far as it goes: given that so many students don’t submit class rank, it’s of limited utility. I don’t think Chicago (or Columbia) release Common Data Set data, at least not in recent years. But the CDS for Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard indicate that only 25%, 23%, 36% of admitted students submit their class rank. (Harvard says it doesn’t consider class rank.) Because Chicago isn’t releasing CDS data [any more?], we can’t tell how many submitted class rank in the year for which the collegedata.com data was collected, but I can’t think of any reason why it would be higher than the 25% or so. I would imagine that students with high class ranks are more likely to report them.
At our school, both unweighted and weighted class rank are calculated from all 8 classes. 9th graders aren’t even allowed to take more than 5 academic classes, and even students competitive for HYPS etc. usually take only 5 academic classes at a time throughout high school. Strong students mostly use the other 3 classes for mandatory health and PE, arts classes (some of which are excellent and much better than many of the academic classes), newspaper, lit mag, internship etc. In theory, a student could still take 15 AP classes doing this; mine took 12. Getting a 90 or a 95 rather than 100 in PE or theater or one of the nonsense-electives-that-are-more-like-study-hall-that-you-might-get-placed-into-if-the-good-electives-are-full will drop your class rank just as much as getting 90 or 95 rather than 100 in an AP Calculus class would. If my DD hadn’t ended up with a class rank at least in the top 10%, I would have told her not to report class rank on the common app, and maybe submit a note in that place they give you to explain that only 5/8 of class rank is calculated from academic classes. I doubt colleges would have gone back and put it into their CDS stats from her transcript.
For a very small percentage of kids, their high schools are reasonably similar to the education at a school like Chicago. For most kids, their high school experiences will be very, very, very, very different from education at a university that insists that it “values constant questioning and challenge”. I am not arguing that effort and focus don’t matter. I’m saying that the set of kids who will apply a lot of effort and focus to 50 or 60 hours of what they know to be useless and mind-numbing “academic” work in their schools each week, so that they can graduate with a 4.0 or a 100%, rather than to something else (intellectual or otherwise), is not necessarily the same set of kids who will thrive at Chicago.
I am not - NOT - saying that a high percentage of the kids who would thrive at Chicago, or that Chicago admits, have low class ranks or a 3.0 GPA or a failing grade in an academic class in 9th grade or anything like that. Because, as has been said, you’d need something to make up for that kind of application weakness, and even perfect SAT scores probably wouldn’t be enough; you’d need interesting essays, that maybe explain the weakness, and probably something else as well.That kind of combination is probably rare. (The same way that admittees with mediocre SAT/ACT scores are rare.) Partly because intellectually gifted kids in bad schools (which is most schools, to varying degrees, unfortunately) often can make their way well enough. Their intellect may somewhat make up for their depression and allow them to minimize time on (if never eliminate) busywork and offset unfinished busywork homework with stellar scores on tests. Or they may be at school where there isn’t much homework and the busywork is at least limited to 35 hours or less a week. Or they may encounter a teacher somewhere along the line who understands their gifts and their despair, and encourages them to toe the line enough to get into the top 10% of the class so that they can finally get to an environment where they can flourish.
And it’s partly because, even if Chicago and others are still missing lots of kids who might really benefit from and contribute to their colleges (especially those who don’t have parents advocating for them and helping them advocate for themselves), the colleges can’t look into their hearts and minds and whole life history and do have to base their admissions decisions on something (now that Chicago is so popular and isn’t just allowing “self-selection” to work its magic). Which is sad, but not something Chicago can fix. Many of these kids may not even be graduating from high school.
No system is perfect. I don’t think Chicago is doing a bad job of selecting its classes right now, and we know it lets in some kids with very, very low test scores (relative to the typical kid at Chicago). As I said, I’m not against making that policy more well-known with a splashy “test-optional” announcement. It would be harmful, though, to change the emphasis to the perfect GPA or #1 class rank (though GPA and “rigor” may be important substitutes for the kids with low or absent test scores, to assure that the kid can probably do the work at college). That’s all I’m saying.
