My daughters private high school claims that 99-100% are prepared so they can go to a 4 year college so I think her class ranking is going to be a bit weird. I have seen her transcript many times but not her class ranking. Do they finalize it senior year? Am worried that even with good SAT scores and a good GPA because her class ranking may only be top 25% she won’t look as good as if she has been in top 10%.
Also, any guess if class ranking is with weighted grades?
When your daughter applies to college, the high school will send a school profile along with her transcript. This will give the ranges of GPAs on her class.
I wouldn’t worry about her class rank at all. Many many high schools don’t rank students at all anymore…or they rank them in deciles.
The colleges will be looking at the strength of your daughter’s courseload and her grades.
My D went to a college prep HS where 99% of the graduates went on to 4 year colleges. The other 1% to the military. They didn’t report rank outside the top decile.
If you haven’t seen class ranks to date, they very possibly aren’t published. My older D had them printed on every quarterly grade report, starting in 9th grade. The school changed policy and now they are never published, or shared with colleges.
Thanks! I was filled out a form for college info and someone asked her rank and I didn’t know! That is why I even brought up the topic.
Our school doesn’t rank. My daughters have done fine getting into college.
Our high school ranks but the info doesn’t come out until sometime senior year so students who need it for specific colleges can use it. However it is not finalized until after seniors finish the entire year including senior year finals at the end. The valedictorian/top 10 don’t know until a day or so before graduation. The school will give schools an idea more such as 1-5% more so than give exact ranks.
How high schools calculate class rank (if they do) is up to the high school.
Note that even if class rank is not published, The Common Application school report asks counselors to check rank ranges for various attributes of the applicant: https://commonapp.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/d0000000eEna/a/0V000001Avzq/PBXzR0UOtu4hSdgTXHDH9Sk6bTeQ6w8l2NQblq_KoZ0
California public universities do not use class rank as calculated by the high school. There is an ELC rank that is based on UC recalculated GPAs of a recent previous class where being above the GPA of the top 9% gives ELC status for UCs.
For Texas public universities, class rank from the high school is the most important factor.
Our public high school stopped ranking a number of years ago and I believe it was due to students running into problems when they were applying to schools that used rank as an important criteria. I just looked that the deciles and it looks like nothing has changed. The 75% spot is a 4.1 on a 4.0 scale and 50% is 3.6.
I would imagine students could have run into trouble, being ranked 350th out of a class of 500 yet maintaining a 4.0. This would only get worse for the mostly A student (with a few Bs) ending up ranked in the lower half of the class. Not the message one of the top schools in the state would be looking to send on applications.
Our private HS doesn’t rank and DD did fine with admissions.
Our kid’s HS didn’t rank either. I think that ranking is especially rare in private high schools, because ranking actually reduces a kid’s chance to be accepted to an “elite” college. I mean, how can you get 60% of your graduating class into colleges that boast that 90% of their students were in the top 2% of their HS?
One of the main reasons that there is so much grade inflation in private high schools is because of parental pressure. The main reason that parents want their kids to have high grades in HS is to increase the kid’s chance of being accepted to an “elite” college. However, it won’t help a kid to have a 4.0 UW GPA, if that is the GPA shared by 30% of the school, since then all of the 4.0 students will only be in the top 30%, which is not what “elite” colleges look for in applicants.
Solution - get rid of ranking. Colleges don’t know and don’t care much if the 4.0 that a student has is the same as another 30% of the class.
However, getting rid of ranking is, in fact, a good thing. Ranking does not do very well in either demonstrating the actual quality of students, nor does it necessarily get students to do their best.
A, a student doesn’t need to do their best, they need to do better than some other students,
B, a student can rise in ranking without improving, because other students mess up, and
C, it’s very difficult to rank students with different courses of study. AP stats is definitely not as challenging as AP Calc BC, and there are honors courses which are more challenging than some AP courses. Moreover, ranking systems notoriously benefit kids who stay within their comfort zone. For example, a brilliant STEM kid who decides to take an art class and doesn’t do well is penalized twice - once for taking a “less rigorous” course, and again for getting a B. yet this kid challenged themselves much more than the other STEM kids whose course of study focused mainly on STEM topics.
Our kid’s high school ranks the top ten students only. Everyone else is placed in deciles, not specific ranking.
Frankly, I wish they would do away with ranking altogether.
Our school (private) doesn’t rank. It also doesn’t weight classes. And I think, contrary to @MWolf 's school, only one student has gotten a 4.0 on a 4 point scale in the last 5 years.
Students are asked to push themselves and take risks. This is a hard sell when there is a big penalty for finding that learning edge. And realistically, how do you rank two kids with vastly different talents? The kids who are doing CalcBC as freshmen are generally not the ones getting a novel published.
Of course, part of the reason this works is that the school isn’t trying to differentiate between kids with vastly different rigor and drive. It’s harder in a school in which there are gen ED classes at one end of the spectrum and AP classes at the other. In our LPS, ranking has had some perverse outcomes – kids avoid latin because it doesn’t have an honors level while Spanish does, for example.
Our school does send detailed information on the general range of grades in each class, who takes them, etc.
Another reason weighted GPAs are somewhat meaningless out of context. Our HS’s “highest honor roll” is 4.0 and above. More than half the senior class is on it. So a w3.98 is bottom half.
They changed the weighting with my D21’s class - I think 11% were highest honors last quarter. (Though 80% are still on one of the three honor rolls, which goes down to 3.25)
I think the plan is to announce/award 1, 2 (both speak at graduation) and top 10 (receive awards) shortly after Q3 senior year. How can you speak at graduation if you only find out a day before graduation?
sorry I forgot senior finals are earlier than grade 9-11 finals. Looking at this year’s calendar (and assuming no snow days) senior finals end Friday May 22. Graduation is May 31st this year. I assume they find out on Monday May 25 so gives them a few days then it needs to be checked over by someone I think. It has never been an issue since there are no classes in between finals and graduation - just fun senior activities.
It doesn’t make sense to me that the 4th quarter and finals don’t count for anything towards gpa. Sure students have a clue but nothing is finalized before all info is in. We have #1, class orator, and class president speak at graduation so two of them do know for about a year. We have a senior awards night which might be before finals since we don’t have awards based on that info. They print a school newspaper after the info is out to give out at graduation with info on all top 10 students but only top 2 are announced at graduation.
My daughter went to a top 10 in the US magnet school and her school’s profile (that the HS sends to the colleges when you apply)
Class Rank
The majority of our students earn grades that are exemplary. Each year a large percentage of the senior class receives Semi-Finalist or Commended Status on the NMSQT. We believe that our students’ levels of achievement are not fully communicated by using class rank as a singular transcript statistic. High Technology High School and XXX County Vocational School District policy, therefore, precludes reporting of class rank.
I think our kids found out at least a few days in advance but they all kind of knew it was a strong possibility. DD was Class President so she just planned on a speech anyway, knowing she was most likely also val. Sal wasn’t determined until a few days out because it was so close (and they ended up calling it a tie). One had been hinted by the GC to start writing, and is a good writer who could whip something out quick. The other one DD shared her speech with and they took turns reading parts of it!
My high school didn’t rank, the speaker at graduation was the class president. Other schools vote for a speaker.
I’ve learned from CC that there are almost as many ways to rank students as there are high schools and many of them make no sense at all. Some schools will penalize you if you take art courses on top of a regular schedule. Others will give you a bonus if you take gym classes in the summer. What I’ve seen is that by and large, colleges can figure this out and the “right” kids get into the top schools.
FWIW, our school never told anyone their rank until the end of the first quarter senior year and even if you did poorly on courses that year you retained your rank. I remember asking what my younger son’s rank was likely to be junior year as his grades hovered between B+ and A-, and was very surprised that his GC said there was no question that he’d be in the top 10%. (No grade inflation at our high school - or maybe just a big tail of poor performing students!)