@OHMomof2 private schools in our state do not rank their kids . ( a huge advantage to them in admissions since admit office doesn’t know exactly where a stellar student ranks ). In contrast state law requires all pubic schools in our state rank each kid which hurts largely indistinguishable students where 0.1 difference in GPA can be 30 ranking spots. (There are typically 30 4.0UW kids w APs at our school but the elite schools typically only take the top ranked 3-4 or the white/asian kids.) Another example most elite private school in our area has multiple “editor in chiefs” for the school paper so kids get seemingly exclusive titles when they apply to college without the admit offices knowing how many of these kids have these titles. So not having class percentage is likely from schools that refuse to rank them.
I have never heard of a state requiring public schools to provide class rank, which is unfortunate considering that many public and private schools have stopped providing it over the last decade because it is a disadvantage, in a number of ways.
Amherst’s CDS shows only 23% of enrolled students’ schools reported rank, which is in line with some of the stats from this several year old article. 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=.8b14df490388
@Mwfan1921 yep north carolina general statute law. Linked below!
Each transcript must include class rank. ( for public schools only. private schools don’t rank, and have multiple editors in chief for their newspaper and lots of other perks. There’s a reason Ivy league acceptance rate is much higher from private than public. some unfortunate kid from our affluent public district somehow got the counselor letter (after getting rejected from harvard) and there were typos and grammar errors throughout, read in public at a school board meeting.) . Our rival private school has separate class counselors from getting into college counselors and like 40 kids per; our public counselors have about 500 kids and must do all aspects of counseling.
NC General Statute
https://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySection/Chapter_116/GS_116-11.html
“The Department of Public Instruction shall generate and the local school administrative units shall use standardized transcripts in an automated format for applicants to higher education institutions. The standardized transcript shall include grade point average, class rank, end-of-course test scores, and uniform course information including course code, name, units earned toward graduation, and credits earned for admission from an institution of higher education. The grade point average and class rank shall be calculated by a standard method to be devised by the institutions of higher education.”
It’s very sad, the affluent public schools have 30-40 kids with 4.0s and APs and kids that do something like take AP computer science instead of Art as a required elective and/or take online AP psychology freshmen year do that to make sure they can be in the top 10. Our school board in a public meeting would like to get rid of class ranking but can’t since they said it’s a state law.
It penalizes urban/suburban strong districts and rewards rural kids from weak districts, which is where the state legislature is over represented. It’s also a bit unhealthy to have 9th graders already gaming the system.
There are some full ride scholarships to UNC that are spread out by county and if you are from either the Raleigh or Charlotte counties to get that you basically also get into Ivy or Stanford and have robotics patent or highly downloaded App. (not to be overly harsh but the kids that come from low population counties that get these merit scholarships do not compare. )
They’ve decreased the gap between male and female acceptance rates significantly. For that admissions cycle it was 13.63% for males and 12.15% for females. The year before, it was 14.57% for males and 11.57% for females.
The relative M/F acceptance rates will generally be a function of the M/F split of applicants, as the school tries to keep the overall split as close to 50/50 as possible…and that desire is a significant constraint as typically many more women apply to LACs than men (of course a greater number of women attend college as well).