<p>Why is class rank so important? Different schools have different amounts of people and varying degrees of difficulty. I'm 25 out of 220. This means I'm not in the top 10% that colleges "want". I realize there are multiple factors that goes into getting admitted, but I'm wondering why class rank is considered a deciding factor.</p>
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<p>That’s one of the reasons why class rank is important to some colleges. (You can look at Common Data Sets for different schools to see how much they care about class rank.)
Some schools have more students than others, so they don’t expect you to have an absolute rank like, say, top 10. They want you to be in the top 10% (or whatever they want) because it gives them some idea of where you stand regardless of the size of your class.
Some schools are more difficult than others, so a 3.0 unweighted GPA (say) doesn’t mean the same thing at every school. A valedictorian with a 3.0 probably goes to a really challenging high school, and they shouldn’t be looked down on for having a relatively “low” GPA if they apply to top schools. If you go to a school where a 3.0 puts you in the bottom of your class, your school probably has more grade inflation and colleges aren’t going to be so impressed.
It’s not perfect, though…for example, I don’t like how a lot of schools rank on weighted GPA and getting an A in a regular class can lower your weighted GPA and class rank. But class rank has some benefits. </p>
<p>I’ll second what Heather said. Class rank doesn’t determine your intelligence. It’s merely a ranking system that ranks you among the students that are in your class. Don’t worry about your rank because some schools don’t have them (AKA my school). It won’t break or make your application. </p>
<p>Class rank can be useful for judging you in context of your school.
HOWEVER, in my experience in a really messed up school district, it doesn’t accurately portray who is “at the top”. People who take an open hour and “honors option” classes have higher ranks than people taking 7 APs. IMHO, that’s why standardized tests are needed; to accurately distinguish who’s really at the top.</p>
<p>I don’t think class rank is as important as it used to. My school stopped reporting our class ranks this year.</p>
<p>@halcyonheather I am not in the top 10% by 4 people while im in the top 1% at a school 20 minutes away from me. I’m just worried schools won’t take the time to look at my transcripts because my class rank is in the average they want.</p>
<p>No worry bro. Class rank is more correlation than causation. Because different schools have different weighting systems, the rigor of schedules is always assessed individually. </p>
<p>Ofc, 4.0UW + rigor is ideal, but 3.x + rigor probably beats 4.0 w/o rigor.</p>
<p>“I am not in the top 10% by 4 people while im in the top 1% at a school 20 minutes away from me.” I think you completely missed the point of class rank. The point of class rank is to identify the best students in each school, regardless of each school’s particular curriculum and grading policies. You can’t have a rank in another school because you didn’t earn your grades in that school. </p>
<p>@mathyone I’m just showing how different it can be. Obviously the school down the street may be harder and have more “smart people” but I just said that to show how I could be seen as top 15% in one place and another person have top 1% at another place with us having the same grades (with possibly easier classes). Obviously the 1% is more impressive at face value. I don’t want to be denied because of my class rank vs. another students when we have around the same grades. This is just taking one factor out of the many. I know what the point of class rank is. Sorry if this is jumbled, I’m writing this during school (we have laptops at our high school and I check CC constantly lol).</p>
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<p>Class rank exists because the same grades mean different things at different schools. </p>
<p>"I don’t want to be denied because of my class rank vs. another students when we have around the same grades. " You’re still not getting it. The same grades may be harder to get at that other school. Or the kids may just have a lousy educational environment and so the kids who get those same grades have achieved more considering their environment and opportunities.</p>
<p>@halcyonheather @mathyone Do colleges really take the time to research whether one high school is better than another THOUSANDS OF TIMES. Don’t they look at all of this at face value? This question is where that quote comes from.</p>
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<p>It doesn’t matter which school is better. Class rank measures where you stand relative to other people in your school, regardless of how good your school is. Different schools use different ranking systems, and some are more flawed than others.</p>
<p>We can conjecture that the other school might be better because it may have more intelligent students or less grade inflation…why else would the same grades result in a higher class rank? It’s probably not as easy to get high grades at that school, or a higher percentage of people would have done it. But again, it doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>Colleges receive a school profile from each applicant, and if they’ve had many applicants from the same high school they probably have a good idea of how difficult that high school is based on previous experience. </p>
<p>I think most admissions officers are responsible for a particular region, so they’re probably familiar with any schools from which they regularly get applicants. But I’ll say it again, the class rank provides some measure of how well you achieved in your particular environment–which was not the school 20 miles away from you. It’s a pretty imperfect measure because schools don’t even calculate class rank in the same way, and no matter how you calculate it, you are going to be unfair to someone. Think you should reward kids for taking challenging courses? How do you determine how much more challenging the courses are? Is AP human geography really as hard as BC calculus or AP chem? And is it perfectly ok to bump kids down because they’re committed to the arts, and perhaps working way harder in those classes/activities than some silly “honors” class? Well, if you can’t decide a fair weighting system you can always throw out all the weights. Just don’t complain when the val is someone who never took any honors or AP classes.</p>
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<p>I’m going off on a tangent, but I don’t think this is necessarily as inevitable as people think it is. It depends where you are, and that’s probably why different schools rank differently. For example, I go to a relatively low-performing public school—pretty much everyone who cares at all takes honors classes, and most people in honors classes get high grades. No one in all regular classes is getting a 4.0 or anything close because a lot of them don’t even do the work, so it works to rank people on unweighted GPA.
(Weighted GPA bothers me when it’s taken outside the context of class rank. I remember when that Suzy Lee Weiss article was going around and everyone kept reporting how she had a 4.5 GPA, which sounds “better than perfect” to a lot of people because it’s a bigger number than 4.0. But all schools weight GPA differently, so it means nothing without a scale.)</p>
<p>@Mathone - It is fair to weight certain classes below others. If you are working hard in an arts class, great, but it is not nearly as challenging as an Honors Math or Science class. And working hard doesn’t make you automatically better than another students, especially if you work hard in easy classes.</p>
<p>And while AP HUG is definitely easier than Calculus or Chem, having the weighted level be based on AP, Honors, or not is more uniform than 1,000 different class rankings.</p>
<p>“If you are working hard in an arts class, great, but it is not nearly as challenging as an Honors Math or Science class.” Sorry, but my daughter is spending way more time on art than honors biology. She probably spent more actual time on honors algebra and honors geometry, but that’s because there were more busywork homework problems do to. I heard a lot more cries of frustration as she was working on her current painting than I ever did when she was taking those math classes, which she described as “really easy”.</p>
<p>@mathyone Thank you for the insight. My school has AP and honors classes on a 5.0 scale and regular classes at a 4.0 scale so thankfully the val isn’t someone that doesn’t take all honors.</p>
<p>[that sounded really snobbish so I’m editing here. I’m saying thankfully there aren’t people that can get A’s in regular classes and (would probably get) Bs in honors courses that would be val.]</p>
<p>@halcyonheather That makes sense. Thank you!</p>
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<p>An art class that required mastery of some kind (as opposed to an art appreciation class where you’re graded on effort) would be way more challenging for me than an honors math/science class.
(GPA is mostly supposed to reflect how you performed in “academic” classes, though, so I understand why art classes aren’t weighted. Art schools don’t evaluate people based on the grades they got in art classes.)</p>