<p>so. here is my dilemma. for the past 30 or 40 years my school hasn't done class rank EXCEPT for the #1 student. that was okay by me because I managed to squeak by with the best gpa. however, the college advisor of about 35 years retired at the end of last year, and we are stuck with a new guy. i was sort of making conversation with the new college advisor the other day, and ranking came up. he said that the school does ABSOLUTELY NO ranking. what should i do??? should i talk to him, complain, have my parents talk to him and/or principal....? i don't want 4 years of hard work to be for nothing!</p>
<p>Biz,</p>
<p>Don't panic. Your hard work will not be for nothing because grades stil do matter. It doesn't matter if you are the highest ranked student if you did not take the most reigerous courses your school offeres and you did well lin those courses. If possible look up the common data sets for the schools which you are interested in. You will find that there is almost a 50/50 split of admitted student coming from schools that rank and schools that do not. Just make sure that the no ranking policy is reflected in the schools profile. </p>
<p>Michelle Hernandez (A is for admission) addressed this question on the parent's forum as follows..</p>
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. The trend to eliminate class rank just makes it much harder for colleges to figure out where a student stands. IMO, it HURTS kids because colleges can no longer figure out who the top kids really are. Getting rid of rank or not reporting GPA distribution basically helps some middle range kids, but always hurts the top kids. Smart counselors get around this by stating class position in the letter, "although we don't rank, John is clearly our top student this year."
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<p>p.s. you can do a search by her screen name and read more of answers to parents questions about the admission process</p>