When trying to decide which colleges to apply and ultimately to attend, do people look to the class rank distribution? And if so, where there any floors you assigned so as to knock out of contention? What was the floor %?
For example. Lets say your child is in the top 10% of his class. Do you look for colleges with a high percentage of students that also were in the top 10%? Or do you not consider this worthy of a make or break rule? Would it matter that only 20% of the attending students were in the top 10% of their class? Would you insist that at least 50% be in the top 10%? Higher? 75%?
Is it valid that if a college has a high percentage of top 10% of HS class students, then the learning environment will be heightened because you basically have a pool of like minded studious students. Or is this just a fools errand?
I never considered percentages because my kids went to a small high school in a wealthy area where all the kids perform well above “average” so the different between the kids in the top 10% and the kids in the top 20% were almost indistinguishable by GPA alone. In the last month of high school the district had a formula based on GPA, weighted for a list of the 8 “most difficult classes” and the state testing score (ACT or SAT) that created a list of the “senior scholars.” It is always interesting because there are always outliers in the list from what might be expected just from GPA.
Plus the common data set supposedly is based on unweighted GPA and test scores, so it’s pretty easy to see where your student falls for that particular institution. But being from Michigan…you can pretty much classify kids tongue in cheek as will be accepted to UofM, might be accepted to UofM after being deferred and won’t be accepted to UofM and go from there.
One other factor that occurred to me is grade inflation and deflation…not all high schools are created equally so the caliber of students in the top 10 designation will vary - although I think it’s safe to assume that a student in the top 10% of any high school will find a selective college…just might not be the lotto colleges.
It didn’t occur to us to look at those numbers, however, the general concept of wanting to be challenged and with like minded students did play into my kids’ decisions. I think you could look at what percent were in the top 10% of their class but I would also look at average SAT and ACT scores and GPA. I think it’s better to take all of those into account if being with others like that is important. That said, there are plenty of schools that have honors programs that would give a student the same kind of environment among a larger population.
If a student is looking for HS class rank peers at a college, then the size of the college can be important. If 20% of a 10,000 student college is a student’s HS class rank peers, that makes 2,000 students, which is as many as at a 2,000 student college with 100% HS class rank peers.
If a student is an outlier on the high end of a college’s range of high school academic credentials, s/he may want to investigate the availability of honors courses or other rigorous course and major options. These may be more likely at a large school, where the number of high end outliers is larger than at a small school with a similar distribution. However, each school should be checked specifically.
Since most students don’t report a rank, and your rank can vary hugely depending on what kind of school you attend, I think it’s pretty hard to use rank very meaningfully. I don’t think only a tiny handful of kids from our high school get into the super highly competitive universities from our high school without being in the top 5%, That’s still 35 kids getting into Ivies and their ilk.
We do have an occasional student who creeps into the top ranks without a super rigorous schedule because APs and honors are only lightly weighted and APs aren’t weighted more than honors.
We have a public HS here in FL that routinely names 15+ students as valedictorians, and a private HS with a class size of around 200 that last year had 22 valedictorians. I know some people that adjust their kid’s schedule in order to manipulate the GPA (such as taking fewer total classes so that the available AP classes they do take carry slightly more weight). Because of things like this, I haven’t paid much attention to the class rank makeup.
At D’s large high school offering every available AP class, the top 10% of kids all have well above a 4.0. Ranking can easily come down to the aspiring doctor who took the AP art class or the aspiring musician who was able to take AP Cal and AP Physics classes as a freshman (D has classmates already taking up to 3 AP classes as freshmen). I don’t think that means that the kid with the 3.9 GPA who is suddenly not in the 10% is less deserving because he wanted to take four years of debate or band rather than load up on APs in subjects he’s not interested in. So, no, there are many things to consider when choosing a college, but I don’t think raw data on the number of 10-percenters is one of them.
It did not occur to me that there are tactics being employed to try to boost class rank such as taking less classes so that AP will give more of a boost. I did figure there was a large enough pool of people who try bulk up on AP classes to help with GPA (which class rank is a product of as well). My son has employed that strategy as well but also to just be more challenged and enjoying the types of kids in his AP classes. Our school offers AP classes that most can fit in and take by the time they graduate. I do not the number bit I guess around 8 classes in total. I am not even sure if they offer AP to freshman at my school.
But I guess I would say that however many AP classes you offer, would not all the top kids be taking them? And if so, then it is how well they do in them that sets them apart. So in that case it is nice to know, of those kids, which one is in the top 10%. And as you noted if some schools offer 3 AP classes to freshman and this allows a 4.6 GPA at graduation, then using GPA raw data is worse I think than using the top 10% from that school because all the kids had the opportunity to take 3 AP freshman year. What one is after is how this person stacks up against the rest of the kids in the school since they all attended in the same environment.
“because all the kids had the opportunity to take 3 AP freshman year.”
Because - no they didn’t. Only the kids who transferred into this public high school from one particular charter school have the opportunity. They’re taking AP Calculus AB, AP Biology, and AP Physics - all of which have prerequisites that usually don’t even start until high school.
@tutumom2001 wow. AP Calc AB during freshman year? My son is taking Calc BC senior year. So if these kids take BC during the sophomore year, then what next? It almost sounds like those kids would run out of AP classes to challenge them. I guess they could just take a slew of first level AP classes but where is the challenge in that?
@MassDaD68 Some schools offer post AP classes. My son and two others got an extra year ahead in the math sequence in middle school and a couple more kids got to their level by taking pre-calc in the summer. The school decided to offer linear algebra to accommodate them. Many high schools also have programs that allow students to take courses at nearby colleges.
@mitchklong So True. That is the problem also. You want your child surrounded by like dedicated students but the scholarship money is where the student will stand out. You have to weight what is most important. So many things to think about when college is considered.
That happens a lot at my kids’ school. A lot of them are taking the virtual classroom classes at Georgia Tech by their junior year (an option for my D17 which she chose not to do due to the fact that she’d have to be at school by 7:30 am to participate-it’s a live feed with an active board for participating).
A lot of the kids at my kids’ school do dual enrollment (like at GA Tech) to boost their GPA. Our school does weight and rank, and the gaming of that is so ridiculous that it’s ludicrous.
SAT percentiles is a better method for identifying reach/match/safety schools. Class rank is relative to the quality of the student body at the high school. Class rank means different things at different high schools.
A very large number of better high schools are doing away with class rank entirely esp in the Northeast. I would be very hesitant to use class rank as a guide…