<p>I am ranked 6/160, but I have straight A's except for gym. Will this hurt? (and toughest class schedule.)</p>
<p>gym?</p>
<p>I never took it. Its a joke in my school.</p>
<p>If Harvard were to accept every class valedictorian and salutatorian who applied there, they could fill all of their seats. Class rank is merely an interesting supplement to let them know how well you are doing compared to students in that school, kind of like what they do when they ask teachers who are writing recommendations to check those boxes...</p>
<p>And, I think, when schools don't rank their students, the colleges use the info they have on that school - which is astonighingly extensive, and the info they have on you to come up with their own approximation. I've heard that they do it regardless of whether or not the school provides rank - but I really can't be sure.</p>
<p>haha la canada....they have a decent water polo team, but my team beat them at junior olympics :) :) hehe. sorry. anyways, who cares about rank, i mean, you could simply work really hard and gain a high ranking. but what matters is if you are actually smart. grr. i hate the people who are ranked ahead of me but are stupid.</p>
<p>I doubt they have any info on my school. As far as I know, we haven't had any Harvard apps in ten years!</p>
<p>Sigh. I hate it when schools like mine consider the 89.5 rounded up to be the same as a 98</p>
<p>legendofmax- i feel your pain</p>
<p>sicarii - I play polo at La Canada. Where are u? We rocked JO's. didn't go this year.</p>
<p>haha. i play in houston, but at JO's i played with orange county WPF. where is la canada located anyway?</p>
<p>jerew--</p>
<p>Harvard does have information on your school; your counselor is required to send a school profile with his/her recommendation and your transcript. And trust me, it helps, especially if you come from a really crappy school, like mine. If your school has an avg. SAT I score of 900 or so (like mine) and you have a 1440 (as I did), you look impressive.</p>
<p>Only three kids took the SAT. Everyone Else took the ACT. I'm not too sure what this means. the Valedictorian got a 1450, I have a 1550. the other girl probably got like a 1200. This is the counselor who I had to explain what "deferred" meant. Uh Oh</p>
<p>Wow, your counselor didn't know what "deferred" meant? That's pretty serious!!
I'm the opposite situation from you. A person in my grade who's ranked lower than me got 80 points higher than me. (... but I always knew he was smarter than me) </p>
<p>legendofmax, what's worse is that a 97.4 is the same is a 92.5 in my school. </p>
<p>saxfreq, I hope what you said is true; my school's average is about a 1000.</p>
<p>it seems that lower-ranked students generally out-score high-ranked students on standardized tests, often even surpassing the valedictorians.</p>
<p>my two cents' worth.</p>
<p>"it seems that lower-ranked students generally out-score high-ranked students on standardized tests, often even surpassing the valedictorians." </p>
<p>Yes, many of the high-score, low-grade students are smart kids who are turned off by school. In my graduating class back in the 1970s, of the top six kids in the school district on the SAT I, two dropped out and two almost didn't graduate because they were short on credits until the last possible minute. They did much better in college, where they didn't have to waste so much time with mindless busy work. </p>
<p>But having low grades is simply not a successful strategy for applying to the most selective schools (although I have heard of kids dropping out of high school through boredom, having previously obtained good grades, and getting into Caltech or MIT). See a new online essay by Paul Graham, "What You'll Wish You'd Known," </p>
<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html</a> </p>
<p>for advice on how to keep your mind from being numbed in high school and still getting good enough grades to be a competitive applicant to all colleges.</p>
<p>yeh, I've considered dropping out but it didn't seem to be broadening my options for after HS, so I settled for getting valedictorian instead. My HS is one where the val did get the highest SAT and ACT scores: 1490 and 35 respectively. Wasn't about to let a terrible school district bring me down.</p>