<p>Has anyone heard of Academic Index? I don't know if it's very well known or not. I'm reading this book called "A is for Admissions" by Michelle Hernandez, and she talks about this supposedly "guarded secret" that admissions officers at exclusively Ivy League schools keep about a ranking system they give to students, called Academic Index. Apparently, it's based on your SAT I scores, your top three SAT II scores, and your converted rank score (CRS), which is a number derived from your class rank and .</p>
<p>AI = <a href="SAT%20I%20Math%20+%20SAT%20I%20Verbal">u</a> + <a href="SAT%20II%20+%20SAT%20II%20+%20SAT%20III">u</a> + CRS
.......................2............................................3</p>
<p>So it's the average of your SAT math and verbal, plus the average of your top three SAT scores, plus your CRS.
Also, the zero is chopped off of all of the SAT scores, so the highest AI possible is a 240.</p>
<p>And CRS is calculated with the formula:</p>
<p>Z = 2 x absolute rank) - 1
...........2 x class size</p>
<p>So having a smaller class size can hurt you.
She also mentioned that if your school mentions only percentile ranking, rather than absolute rank, it can hurt you because they place you in the middle of that percentile ranking to be fair, when you may be at the top. So if you were the top 10% of 100 students, and you were valedictorian, you would be assigned the absolute rank "5" instead of "1." (Although she says that if you were valedictorian or something similarly high, they would question why the school didn't tell them that.)</p>
<p>So is this generally an unknown thing, or is it common knowledge?</p>