<p>is the number of students really a factor when they have set percentages of each letter grade to give out?</p>
<p>if you want to choose random high schools to choose from, i can mention my public high school up in washington state.</p>
<p>out of the people accepted to USC my year (2006), they were also admitted to Emory, Northwestern, Harvey Mudd, Cornell, MIT, Georgetown, Cal, UCLA, Rice, etc. my experience in washington was that only highly qualified applicants tend to apply to USC from out of state because it is viewed as a fairly prestigious school. my guess is that this is fairly common for most OOS applicants. (except for MIT and Rice they all chose USC btw)</p>
<p><em>edit</em>
my friend was chem-e at USC and the class averages on exams for all the p-chem and upper div engineering courses are regularly below 60%.</p>