<p>How much of an impact does class rank have on admissions chances?</p>
<p>I go to a very large public high school where the class ranking system is pretty stupid. A single B drops your class rank like crazy. I had only one B last year but that brought my rank down from 1 to 71. They don't care if the course is honors or AP. If you have a single B, your rank is toast.</p>
<p>I'm only particularly concerned about how the UC system views class rank. I've heard a million different things-some say it doesn't count, since some schools don't rank, some say it helps only if you're in the top 5%, and some say you can't even apply if you aren't in the top 10 or so %, because the UC system automatically tosses applicants that aren't in the top 10% of their class.</p>
<p>Any light shed upon the subject would really help, thanks.</p>
<p>how does a B bring you down to 71st in your class? Every one had a perfect 3.98?</p>
<p>The UC system doesn't care about class rank except to look for ELC Students (Top 4%) that have guaranteed admission to a UC, mainly Riverside and Merced.</p>
<p>UCs look at your UC Capped Weighted GPA and the strength of your courses relative to those offered at your school. They rather have the person with mostly honors and APs with some blemishes on GPA then the 4.0 student with all regular courses when honors and APs are available.</p>
<p>UCs won't toss out people that aren't in the top 10% of their class, well because if they did, well, about 20-30 people from my graduating classs in Cal or LA wouldn't have been considered and no one out of the 100 of my classmates that got into Davis would be able to do so. So that 10% rule is BS.</p>
<p>With the UCs, I believe that they are unaware of your class rank at the time you apply unless you are identified as ELC (top 4% or your class) because you do not have to send a transcript to the UCs at the time you apply, nor do they receive recommendations. You self-report grades on the app, so unless they systematically go through and check the grades for everyone from a given school, they will have no knowledge of rank. They certainly don't throw away apps from people not in the top 10% of their class because they are supposed to take the top 12.5% of California students overall (which at good high schools can be 50% of the class or more).</p>
<p>Well, if you class rank isnt weighted, it think it's fine (although one B makes you go to 71 is pretty interesting). My school uses unweighted rank too so its quite annoying.</p>
<p>The same thing happened to me. I got a single A- and dropped from 1 to 52 because the majority of students at my HS refuse to take any hard classes.</p>
<p>Yeah, you have it hard like I do knight...imagine what a B does to you.</p>
<p>Ugh, unweighed classrank is ridiculous.</p>
<p>Thanks Golden Bear, I was especially worried about that rumor. People offered it as evidence why they were rejected from both UCB/LA but accepted into stanford-because their application never had a chance to be reviewed.</p>