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<p>If you have a 3.0 UW with few AP/honors classes but are #1 in your class, it means you go to a very bad school. Your academic context will be considered but there’s no way that you’ll be viewed the same as a 4.0 UW #1 with multiple APs.</p>
<p>Class rank is judged against schedule rigor. I would amend Hmom’s statement that Class Rank is King. I would say it is queen with Rigor being king. The rigor is in comparison to the school’s schedule.</p>
<p>But just like different schools weight grades differently, so can those different weighting mechanisms cause skewed Class Rankings. . . . </p>
<p>For instance, Kiddo has taken all honors/AP courses to the extent available, thus, taking the most rigorous course load. She has all A’s in all courses, with the exception of two A-'s. Her class currently has about 830 kids and she is ranked 10th. Nevertheless, there are a several kids ahead of her in class rank that have a number of B’s, along with more A-'s.</p>
<p>So, how does that happen? Well, her high school does not begin to weight foreign languages until the third year of the language. When she went to high school, she choose to start over with Latin rather than continue in Spanish. So, she lost language weights for two years. Those kids that continued with Spanish or Hebrew that they’d begun in middle school started high school language courses with weighted classes, as she would have done if she’d continued on with Spanish.</p>
<p>Even though Kiddo has A’s in the same honors and AP classes that other kids have A-'s and B’s in (including the salutatorian, who has quite a few B’s in the same classes Kiddo has A’s), they are ahead of her in ranking because of the loss of those two language weights. If she had continued with Spanish rather than switching to Latin, she probably would be the salutatorian. But she wanted Latin, so that was the price she paid.</p>
<p>So, at least at our high school, the Class Rank is no more telling than the GPA in terms of defining the kids with the ‘best grades in the same rigor of courses’.</p>
<p>Do all schools send in class ranks, or do some only send in percentile ranges (top 10%, top 25%) etc?</p>
<p>bump bump.</p>
<p>Many just send in percentiles/deciles.</p>
<p>Do schools that submit deciles put top-ranking students at greater disadvantage than othe rschools? say I’m 1/300 and my school subtmis deciles while my friernd also 1/300 at another school submits rank. doesn’t that put me at a slight disadvantage?</p>
<p>It might. But schools also usually send the top and bottom GPAs. It would be obvious you were the top GPA.</p>
<p>So anyone want to take a go at this?
What looks worse:
38/628 (6%)
or
top 10%</p>
<p>Or is neither fantastic for ivies and such?</p>
<p>It is not as simple as numbers. The top schools look at the entire package. My son was in the top 25% in a very competative high school. Not so good is it? He had an uw gpa of 94.4, w 101.92. So chance him based on those numbers. His ecs were pretty weak other than a strong commitment to the Marching Band and music progam. He took the most rigorous classes available including placing out of pre-calc through self study. He took Calc 2 at a local LAC (he ran out of math classes at the high school). His ACT was 33. He is currently a student at Swarthmore. It is not just about the numbers, it is also about the fit. Would he have gotten in to Harvard? I doubt it, but he wasn’t interested in Harvard either. He found a place that fit his learning style and was able to make it clear to that school that it was a good fit. He’s a happy boy now.</p>
<p>OK, question. My school ranks based on unweighted GPA, and here an A+ (which is 100% or over) is worth 4.3 grade points, regardless of the class it’s earned in. That also means that people’s unweighted GPA’s here can go above a 4.0. I am currently enrolled in 4 AP classes, an honors class, and Spanish V Literature (the level beyond AP - I took AP Spanish sophomore year), so if they were to go by the weighted GPA, I would very likely be ranked either 1st or 2nd out of a class of 84 students. On the other hand, my unweighted GPA would most likely not go beyond a 4.0 for two reasons: 1) because my teachers don’t give extra credit, and 2) the academic rigor of the courses I’m in. </p>
<p>Due to the small size of my graduating class, I’m afraid that this would put me at a huge disadvantage since not being in the top 4 would automatically kick me out of the top 5% ranking, and people here can inflate their UW GPA’s by opting for the easy courses. Thoughts or advice, anyone?</p>
<p>Colleges will be able to figure this out. You will get rated as taking the most rigorous schedule and your top 10% ranking will be factored in as well.</p>
<p>Everything I’ve heard points to GPA over rank. Ranking is different at every school, and once you pass that threshold of the top 10% (note that top schools have 0% or virtually 0% of their students under that 10% mark in high school), what’s important is unweighted GPA. Colleges rank the transcript above rank. Basically, your grades in individual classes matter more than how you stack up against your classmates, as long as you’re still at the top of the pack.</p>
<p>So I could take this to mean that my 4.0 UW (all A’s and a couple of A-'s) in the most demanding curriculum would override a rank of, say, 5/84 or 6/84?</p>
<p>Sometimes it is impossible to tell. At ivies rank rules because most people have a 4.0 regardless. In terms of which is more important you have to weigh school vs. rank vs. GPA. For instance, at my high school nearly a third of those attending are in the gifted program (IQ of 130+), so naturally getting in the top ten percent is a challenge. Rank is also skewed at a school like this because you are competing with students of great intelligence. GPA is more objective than rank, but since grades are more or less done in comparison to other students’ work GPA is tougher as well. This is why we have SATs. Unfortunately the new movement to do away with SATs makes my 2330 pretty useless considering I’m held back by a 3.75 GPA and 5% class rank. My school is not recognized as elite in any way and gets no more recognition than any other public school. It’s a shame that I see students taking 5 AP classes their sophomore year on this website, but I know that AP means a totally different thing at my school than it does at another school.</p>
<p>(Did I sound pretentious and snooty enough here? Give me some feedback as to how I can sound more like a whining chances blog.)</p>
<p>I’m tired, so here’s my two cents in bullet form. </p>
<p>-The most competitive schools do not rank just for the reasons you mentioned.</p>
<p>-You are not held back by a top 5% rank. You are by a 3.75 GPA.</p>
<p>-Your SAT will validate your GPA by proving that you have a rigorous curriculum. </p>
<p>-The SAT is losing importance when you look at a few cases (Sarah Lawrence comes to mind), but across the board, it’s still important. </p>
<p>-A school profile is sent with your transcript. Colleges know that the level of rigor at your school is greater than that of dinky public school in Montana.</p>
<p>-Unweighted GPA is the most important thing. Not all applicants have 4.0’s, and rank is too arbitrary to be a distinguishing factor. If it comes down to distinguishing between two academically identical students (and when would that happen?), the subjective factors–essays, recs, ECs–become important.</p>
<p>
I’m in a weird situation, where i’m poised to be Val or Sal, but my UW GPA is 3.76, since our school uses weighted GPA to determine class rank and AP’s are heavily weighted. Would that hurt me in the scheme of things if everything else on my application like SAT, recs, and ECs are good?</p>
<p>
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<p>Oh, okay. So if I have a 4.0 UW but don’t make it to the top 5% due to the circumstances I mentioned in my first post (ranking based on UW GPA, small class size, the thing about A+'s being weighted more), I’m still fine being in the top 10%… am I understanding this correctly?</p>
<p>And if your school only sends in deciles and class size and no top and bottom GPA’s?</p>
<p>here’s another situation: say 4.0 GPA is 90+ in every course. if 30/300 people have 4.0, but all have different 100-point scores, how can admissions differentiate between 1/300 and 30/300 if the only info the college receives is a decile (and not a percentile)?</p>
<p>And is 33/370 bad?</p>
<p>The school profile usually also has the top and bottom GPA. If it matches the students GPA then schools know that is the person. 33/370 is top 10%. That’s excellent.</p>