<p>I keep seeing this mentioned by posters and college reps. Someone can have a 3.9 UW GPA and class rank of Top 15%, while at a more difficult school and with more demanding courses another person can have an UW 3.6 GPA and be Top 5%. While SAT Scores are supposed to be the equalizing variable, many people say that you cannot make an admission decision based on 4 hours of a kid's life on a tension-filled Saturday morning. While at many schools there is a hurdle rate--a sort of minimum GPA-- the most important variables in order appear to be: 1. Course Rigor 2. Class Rank 3. UW GPA 4. SAT Scores. Now I am sure the weighting varies from school to school, and some of those that are truly holistic in the Admission process will weight ECs and Essays as equally important. Seems LORs are only a factor if they are a "blow-away" recommendation (usually from a legacy).</p>
<p>Curious of others agree w/the relative ranking of admission factors.</p>
<p>For the most part I agree. Different schools want different things. I’m guessing big state U’s only look at gpa and sat. Most smaller schools it’s been hammered in our head about rigor. High schools are all so different it’s kind of hard to judge what a 3.8 means at one place vs another. However on places like cc all you can do is compare sat’s & gpa’s even if it isn’t the main thing the colleges look at. Just take a look at the ed admission threads at various schools, there are a few things that stand out to me just by looking at it. And of course the answer is get the highest gpa from the hardest classes.</p>
<p>At the most selective schools students have to have everything, including stellar SAT scores. It is foolish to assume otherwise. Simply look at the SATs of the enrolled/admitted student body at the top 10 universities and you will see that the chances of the unhooked student with SATs in the upper 600s of gaining admission are virtually nil, no matter how good the class rank, GPA, and course rigor. Dartmouth’s web site includes admissions rates broken down by score ranges. It is illuminating.</p>
<p>Once kids have met that standard, it is the other factors that make the difference.</p>
<p>In any case, I disagree with your placing of course rigor at #1 in most cases. While a kid will not get into a tippy-top school without it, at a somewhat less selective school I have the impression that GPA and rank trump rigor. Or to put it another way, the threshold of what constitutes sufficient rigor is lower, and they are going to look for rank, GPA and SATs to bolster their published stats, and not “forgive” a student who challenged him/herself mightily but achieved a B average and a lower class rank, even if it is obvious that this student is in fact more capable than most of their admittees and would have achieved a higher GPA/rank if s/he had dropped down into less challenging courses. I have seen this happen to kids I know. </p>
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<p>This is usually said by people with SAT scores that are lower than they think they deserve. The fact is that an outstanding CR score, for example, usually reflects years of voracious and challenging reading, not getting the SAT word of the day on your iphone. It is not a matter of 4 hours on a Saturday morning, and it isn’t even a reflection of a prep course. (Unless it’s a prep course in China. )</p>
<p>Only speaking of my impressions (based on Naviance and what I’ve heard at college night directly from adcoms) of the schools my kids have applied to - selective schools in the 1-60ish range of USNWR rankings. </p>
<p>I think there is a threshold of SAT scores that need to be attained for the applicant without hooks. For the schools we looked at, I’d say about 650 for Math or CR on the lower end, but if one score is low it’s helpful if it’s made up by a very high score for the other one. (One admissions officer said, “SAT scores are less important than you think, but more important than we like to admit.”) Mind you kids with low(ish) scores are going to have to wow the admissions officers some other way, and probably have very little chance at the schools with single digit admissions. My younger son with a 690 in math did get into U of Chicago, Tufts and Vassar. It probably helped that he had a wonderful letter from his pre-calc teacher speaking to his math issues. His counselor may also have addressed it - I didn’t see her letter. (Basically he has great understanding, but is slow, and often has to figure out formulas he’s forgotten from first principles.)</p>
<p>Rigor and rank tend to be intertwined, but I think both are generally are more important than the unweighted GPA. My oldest had B+'s in most of his English courses, but was ranked in the top 2%, he got into Harvard and CMU School of Comp Sci, my youngest had a B+ average in his academic courses, but because orchestra counted in his weighted GPA he was ranked in the top 6%. </p>
<p>I don’t think any student can aim at the tippy top schools if they haven’t taken what counts for a rigorous load at their school. At our school that generally means 1 AP as a sophomore, 2 or 3 as a junior, and 3 or 4 as a senior. We also offer a handful of college level non-AP or beyond AP courses.</p>
<p>I disagree that letters from legacies are all that helpful.</p>
<p>I agree that it varies by HS and by university. We encouraged our students to take the most challenging courses, on the basis that if they couldn’t handle college-level coursework then it didn’t really matter where they were admitted. YMMV.</p>
<p>Unless much has changed since 2007-2008, from my D’s perspective, it was all about UW GPA and SAT/ ACT…maybe it was the schools she was applying to in the top 20-30 but her class rank (which was within the top 5%) seemed to be ignored while her lower than CC standard UW GPA seemed to bump her out of contention…YMMV again…</p>
<p>Actually permitted a large merit award at a lower tier school with a top program so all good…</p>
<p>1) RANK. This is king. At the very top schools the majority of unhooked students were top 2 (not 2%) in their HS class.</p>
<p>2) SAT. Consideration wont go further if the minimum isn’t there. It’s a myth about not judging on 4 hours in someone’s life.</p>
<p>Rigor is essential to get past 1. No one will be a serious candidate at a top school no matter what their rank if rigor isn’t there.</p>
<p>3) ECs. Once rank/scores have been deemed appropriate, ECs become the differentiator.</p>
<p>4) Essays. These are what tip you in the door once you have all of the above.</p>
<p>As for recs, most are pretty generic. There are some teachers at feeder schools that become respected over time and their high praise has impact. But this is increasingly rare. A negative comment will do more than a positive one. These are not as Important as most think.</p>
<p>It depends on the school. In Texas public universities, class rank matters, but GPA does not. In California public universities, GPA matters, but current class rank does not. Many universities use both.</p>
<p>In either case, course rigor matters, whether by formula (as California public universities recalculate GPA with honors/AP courses weighted +1) or by eyeball (a holistic admissions committee person looking at the transcript and noting whether the applicant chose most or all of the most rigorous courses available).</p>
<p>At super-selective schools, you’ll want all of course rigor, GPA, rank, and test scores to be near-maximum (available / possible) in order to be in the running. Of course, even then, the chances of admission are low.</p>
<p>I’d like to emphasize that “rigor” is primarily important in the context of what is available to you. So if your school has AP courses, it will hurt you if you don’t take them. If it doesn’t, it won’t hurt you that you don’t have those courses.</p>
<p>I think all these criteria interact in a way that makes it pointless to try to rank them. That exercise is just so people who are weaker in any one criteria can convince themselves that it is the least important.</p>
<p>The Common Data Set for each school lays out what is most highly regarded. Harvard, for example, doesn’t consider class rank at all.</p>
<p>Class rank is an odd beast. Many (most?) top private high schools recognized long ago that it didn’t do their students any favors in highly selective college admissions by ranking their students. So they dispensed with ranking. The colleges fired back, saying that it didn’t make any difference, they could figure out the student’s class rank, more or less, by looking at the student’s high school transcript and the high school’s profile (which often gives a generalized distribution of course grades and/or senior class GPAs). </p>
<p>In the end, it’s a win-win for the non-ranking high caliber high schools and the colleges. The colleges know the caliber of the students at those high schools. They know that they’ll be able to accept them, secure in the knowledge that these students will do well in college. And, as a bonus, since those students don’t come neatly labelled with course rank, they don’t have to be included in the college’s calculation of the percentage of incoming freshman who were in the top 10% of their class. There’s no “penalty” in admitting a strong student who comes from a highly rigorous high school. Meanwhile, the high school can do well in the college admissions game. The students and parents are reassured that being part of a high caliber pack (instead of a big fish in a small pond) isn’t going to harm their college prospects. </p>
<p>Who loses out? The students at (generally public) high schools that still rank. Also, students at non-ranking high schools who are applying to programs that give preferential admissions to high-ranking students, e.g. the UC’s Eligibility in the Local Context program. </p>
<p>More and more school districts are twigging to this game, especially if there is a significant contingent of families aiming at highly selective holistic admit colleges. </p>
<p>So yes, class rank is important, if your school ranks. If they don’t, then it’s not. Harvard, at least, has figured that out. :)</p>
<p>Not that many schools rank these days…certainly not in our neck of the woods. The schools publish a chart of GPA ranges and the % of students who have that average – but it includes all seniors and does not break out specialized, selective admit programs that live in a part of regular HS. </p>
<p>Both of my kids made the decision to pursue crazy rigor vs. a less frenetic approach, but that is who they are. Yes, it cost them in GPA, but certain schools forgave the GPA in exchange for the academic risk-taking. Those were the schools they wanted to attend anyway, and they both arrived supremely prepared for college. The workload and organization skills were (mostly) there – at least in sufficient quantity for two ADD-inattentive guys to manage without serious crash-and-burn disasters, though both have had to learn some tough lessons.</p>
<p>Ya know, the guys didn’t worry about what looked good for colleges and took the courses they felt they needed. S2 took Honors Physics instead of AP, and picked AP Stat after Calc AB instead of BC. The world didn’t end, he got into the schools he wanted, and Stat is a LOT more useful for his purposes than Calc. S1 took mathematical physics and advanced analysis because they were easier for him than cell physiology and genetics. Viva la difference (and I took German, not French!).</p>
<p>“I think all these criteria interact in a way that makes it pointless to try to rank them. That exercise is just so people who are weaker in any one criteria can convince themselves that it is the least important.”</p>
<p>I agree with Hunt. “Most important” is the characteristic that gets you into a particular school … or the characteristic that keeps you out. Combinations count.</p>
<p>“1) RANK. This is king. At the very top schools the majority of unhooked students were top 2 (not 2%) in their HS class.”</p>
<p>wrong. If you look at the common data sets of many colleges, you will see that many [ nearly 50% in some cases] accepted students were Not ranked, because their HS’s no longer provide rankings.</p>
<p>a) Some kids are in a class of 30, others in a class with >1000
b) The top quarter of our local public HS “defect” to private schools.
c) The niece is Counselor at a large inner-city HS, where the top kid typically attends community college.
d) Kids ranked #2, #3 and #4 in D’s competitive private HS attended UPenn.</p>
<p>I can only conclude that RANK is important … unless it isn’t.</p>
<p>so colleges would have to guess exactly where in the Top 10% the student ranked. If the student is selected Valedictorian or Salutatorian that could give a guess as to as #1 or #2 ranking, but those decisions are made after the admission process is completed. It’s not like the student can include it on his application form. I suppose the colleges have some way to measure the decile ranking to a finer degree if they either 1. Know the high school. 2. have multiple applicants from the same H.S. all in the Top decile ranking and look at their transcripts, or call the school counselor. Not sure the counselor is allowed to disclose anything more exact, but “body language” relative to the specific student is probably not hard to interpret.</p>
<p>" ranked #2, #3 and #4 in D’s competitive private HS attended UPenn."
Penn IS one of the Ivys that DOES care A LOT about rank. This is apparent from their accepted student profile as well as their Common Data set info.</p>
<p>“so colleges would have to guess exactly where in the Top 10% the student ranked.”
Only if they care about rank. And many dont.</p>
<p>^ I think what ACTUALLY happens is that each college leases a network of high-powered computers to determine whether each applicant is above or below some Never-Talked-About threshold. “The computer says this kid was ranked 6th, so he’s in … this other kid came up 7th. Pity, we could use another oboe player.”</p>
<p>To get around “rank is king”, my son’s high school in NOVA ranks every student #1 if they have a weighted GPA over 4.0. My impression is that this helps the students at the 20-60 selectives, but hurts the students at 1-20.</p>
<p>Rank is not the 'ULTIMATE threshold!. Most colleges are not going to automatically toss a students application in the circular file because of rank, if his classes, GPA, & tests scores are “good enough” to have that application move to the next level.</p>
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