<p>Emory is one of those schools that does not consider class rank. An adcom attempted to explain the school's reasoning to me but I have forgotten. Can someone explain why class rank shouldnt be considered? If anything, it provides some kind of standardization in an admissions process that is anything but standardized (cept the tests).</p>
<p>I don't think class rank standardizes at all! For one thing, it may be easy to be rank 1 at one school but much harder at another. You obviously can't say that these two people who are both rank 1 are on the same level. Does that make sense? I don't know about emory specifically but this is probably part of their reasoning.</p>
<p>On the other hand, class rank does show how a student stands in relation to his class. It can help show how easy the grading is, etc.</p>
<p>It can help to show the difficulty of the school..if a kid has a 3.98uw and isn't even in the top 10%, the school is pretty easy, and so on</p>
<p>also, some schools weight hard classes; some don't. At a school that does not weight, the val might be in all easy classes whereas the #5 might have taken a much more challenging course load.</p>
<p>I think that I read somewhere that in Texas, everyone with a weighted 4.0 shares the title of Valedictorian, regardless of the decimal points that follow the 4. Some schools in Seattle have ~40 Vals.... </p>
<p>In California, only about half the public schools rank, so it's becoming less of a factor.</p>
<p>I should have added that, if your school DOES rank, it is extremely important to highly selective schools like the Ivies. Chances of a Val admission can be up to 50%, chances of Sal drops to 30%.....and so on.</p>
<p>Or...for transfer HS students, rank can get messy. For my daughter, some of her former classes were "honors", some regular, but a different mix from what her current school offers. Some of her former classes will be counted as weighted grades, some will not be included at all in her GPA. Since it is a small school, a slight difference in classes taken, can make a huge ranking difference. A student with a class grade of 93.1 vs. a student with a 92.9 get substantially different grades (A vs B) which again can make a big difference in rank. A gifted art student will be penalized over a gifted math student due to difference in AP's offered. Personally I dislike ranking, although my older child benefited by it. Perhaps Emory knows how inconsistent the numbers can be. My guess is that they do not ignore rank completely, but rather do not have hard/set guidelines based on the numbers. Ultimately, I think that is the better path taken.</p>