<p>I was wondering how much of an effect does the quality of your high school come into play. I go to a high school that is ranked ~50th in the country. My school is the full of the most competitive kids you'll ever see, and we send ~8% of our graduating class to ivy league/MIT/Stanford every year. Even Though it is very difficult to get good grades in my school, because everyone is so competitive and all of their parents are from like harard, to make top 10%, you need like a 3.8 gpa. I have a 3.7, but a higher sat of 2250 Superscored. I was wondering how a 3.7 and not top10% looks to top schools who have mostly kids with 3.8s and top 10%? Am I on target for those schools?</p>
<p>Being from a good high school can work against you in a lot of cases</p>
<p>Not bing top 10% will be the truly top schools unlikely. Not to mention that as you say, you’re competing with a ton of legacies for top colleges at a top high school.</p>
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<p>This is so true. I also go to an extremely competitive HS that sends at least a dozen a year to the Ivies. My dream schools this year were UCLA/Berkeley, and unfortunately, pretty much all of the top students from my school (who had perfect stats) applied to them. They all got accepted, while I got shut out of both schools. The same thing happened with a lot of my other schools of choice – the top students who were way more qualified than me applied to them as safeties/matches, so they were all accepted while I was rejected. Had I gone to a less competitive high school where few qualified students applied to those schools, I probably would have had a much better chance of getting in.</p>
<p>In the end, things still turned out okay because I got into a top 25 school that I’m interested in, but it was definitely an uphill battle, since I was only in the top 40% of my class. A lot of kids on this site think that going to a super competitive high school is a good thing, but it really isn’t at all. Unless you’re a genius, it’s simply too hard to compete with the dozens of other geniuses/kids with tiger parents in the same school, especially since you’re all going to be applying to the same colleges.</p>
<p>There’s not a whole lot you can do at this point, but you can try your hardest junior/senior years to get your rank/gpa up. It’s still worth it to apply to some schools with 85-90%+ students being in top decile, and there’s a chance you’ll get into one.</p>
<p>What about schools that no one from my school really applies to? For some reason no one really applies to cal Berkley or uchicago. When I’m not competeting with other students from my high school, how would I fair.</p>
<p>I think many of the top schools would not rank students. That is what my school does because the academic performance of out students is quite high.</p>
<p>We don’t give exact rank except for valedictorian and salutatorian. For the rest it is top 10%, top 25%, top 50% or bottom 50%.</p>