<p>does anyone know if adcoms make much distinction between being val/sal and top 5 percent?</p>
<p>Ranking isn’t even a big factor in college admissions. Many schools don’t report rankings.</p>
<p>yeah, schools don’t really care about ranking, unless you’re valedictorian. otherwise, it doesn’t really matter.</p>
<p>what? top colleges DO care about rankings… although yes small differences don’t usually matter</p>
<p>they don’t care about actual rankings. they break it down like this.</p>
<p>top person
top 10%
top 25%
top 50%
the rest</p>
<p>so in a school 0f 1000, they don’t see the difference between 3 and 26</p>
<p>Well, it’s all dependent on what your school reports.
If your school reports the 3 / 1000 that’s significantly more impressive than 26.
If all they report is top 10% then they’ll just have that to go on and they’ll scrutinize the actual transcript more.</p>
<p>My school doesn’t do any of this! So I guess they’ll really scrutinize the actual grades.</p>
<p>no because colleges know that the difference between that 3 and 26 comes down to getting B’s in 2 or 3 more classes.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone from our high school (large public very diverse) has ever gotten in that wasn’t in the top 2%.</p>
<p>
in some cases it can be just one single A- or B+
I have seen students who don’t have a 4.0 get in and they were top 10 not the top person. One student I know got accepted to MIT with a 3.7-3.8 GPA (and note: he got three B’s junior year)</p>
<p>Rank at the top or equivalent indicator seems to matter significantly for
admittance to Harvard. </p>
<p>It does not matter for most other top 10 schools including MIT.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>^ 98% of students admitted to MIT were in top 10% of HS class</p>
<p>ok, well I am 5/270… though every year, we send 10+ to ivies… I suppose at my level, it doesn’t really matter. (not trying to be arrogant)</p>
<p>^small school</p>
<p>we were told by an admissions person at USC that top colleges look at everything. They need to be able to distinguish between the students. They also are trying to fill certain majors etc. So saying this doesn’t mean that you have to be top in every category, only in what they are looking for. They are trying to find the right fit between student and college.</p>
<p>From everything I’ve looked at, class rank is VERY VERY important to most “top” schools. It’s one of several ways to begin the comparison of apples to apples.<br>
Let’s say high school #1 awards an A- to a 90 percentile. But school #2 gives that a B. That’s a HUGE difference from a 3.667 GPA to a 3.0. And on and on. One teaches better another grades easier. Who can tell what is what.</p>
<p>BUT…when you then factor in class rank…you can REALLY see how that student performs in comparison to those who were graded/educated as they were. No, probably not much difference in top 1-3%. But…getting to the 7-9%, where my D unfortunately hovers, is HUGE.</p>
<p>She switched schools in 10th grade and went from probably top 1-2% to now barely top 7%. Then 100 (!) kids quit school and she slid to top 9%. It’s a GREAT school but has a HUGE inner city faction that …well…quits. But their top level is Very competitive. So, while her stats are:
221 PSAT
2210SAT
750/780 SAT II
34 ACT…</p>
<p>Her GPA is only 4.4 and this school produces a lot of 4.9-5.1 kids (their weighting is low too!). So…she won’t even be considered, I’m sure. Because, with 30,000 apps and only accepting 3,000…there have to be SOME things which toss you over to the “no way” pile.</p>
<p>
And that’s where a transcript comes in. If you look on transcripts, they lists the letters “A, B, C, D, F” and then lists the percents (like from 90-93) and what letter corresponds to the letter and the plus and minus (it’s like a key). Schools don’t simply put a letter there, they put the numbers that corresponds to that letter. And then there are regional representatives who knows which school is harder and has less students which a certain score. </p>
<p>Also let me ask you this, what if a school doesn’t rank or inflate GPAs? I mean there are schools where students can inflate their grades by taking AP/honors classes but there are also schools that don’t use weighting systems. If you look at private schools, many of the top private schools don’t rank. So don’t a lot of the top public schools. Then do they have a disadvantage? Colleges knows that there are schools that don’t rank and they know that a lot of the counselors take a guess at what percentile a student falls in. This is significant in small schools. When you have a very strong school that only has like 200 kids in a grade but many of which are very academically smart but they don’t rank or use weighted grades, they aren’t going to flip through each student’s file and try to find out the exact ranking. They are going to take a guess and put down a quartile, decile, or quintile. And in some cases, it may turns out that the counselors put more than 20 kids as top 10% because they were so similar in academics and got around the same GPA. On the common apps has a place were counselors says:</p>
<p> We do not rank. Instead, please indicate quartile __________ quintile __________ decile ___________</p>
<p>So ranking isn’t that important because there are many many (thousands and thousands) of schools that don’t rank. Yes it does come into play but it isn’t like test scores or GPA or ECs. It has a minor role.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is overoptimistic by 1,000 acceptances.</p>
<p>I think class rank does matter to Harvard and other similar schools, but it’s not an absolute thing, and it varies by school. Someone who is in the top 10% at a small, excellent school may have a better chance than #1 at a mediocre school. And someone who is #1 at a terrible school but who looks like a world-beater is probably better off than #1 at a great school whose greatest skill is conforming to expectations.</p>
<p>At the high schools I know best, Harvard seems to want kids to be near, not necessarily at, the top of the class in rank, but to be the absolute best at something important.</p>