Automatic admission for Students from small school for UT Austin

Son graduating from a Top school (in the top 3 in TX) with the senior class size of around 60 students. How does automatic qualification work for them since Top 6% is just the top student!

Does anybody know how how this works? or, if you can send me a link, would appreciate it. Tried searching in UT’s website but was not successful in finding anything useful? Thanks.

Someone mentioned it here - check out this reply:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21713026/#Comment_21713026

Thank you.

Go to http://catalog.utexas.edu/general-information/admission/undergraduate-admission/#freshmanadmissiontext and scroll to “Admission and small high school classes”.

Thank you! Appreciate your help.

Just confirming on what I read from the link from above- small class (top 6% is 1 student of less)- only the Top Student would be considered. So, if you go to Top School with small class size - you have to be #1 or #2 if there are about 50 students in the class!
Hope more parents understand this issue, especially in TX, who send their kids to top public/magnet/charter schools!

Last year I met a Mom on another thread whose son went to a high performing but small private high school in TX. They sent him to this school to enhance his ability to get into a top school. UT Austin was his dream school. Despite a very impressive record, he did not meet the top % needed to be an auto-admit as there were only a few slots due to a very small class size. This is the back side of that double edged auto admittance sword.

He applied and did not get in, he appealed and was accepted upon appeal but that was a long couple of months.

One of my DD’s friends got into Rice, Harvard and a few other elite engineering schools but wasn’t in the top % needed to be an auto admit to UT Austin. The whole auto-admit thing IMO needs to be re-evaluated, I’m not sure its the best way of choosing the students for the flagship schools here in Texas.

@kg2013

Yes, you’re correct. Only the top student (valedictorian) will be auto-admitted when 6% is mathematically impossible. I think that’s a class of 16 or less.

The institutional change of AA policy for small classes stemmed from this case:
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/05/22/ut-denied-her-so-she-got-them-change-their-admissions-rules/