<p>Some of my friends at other HS have GPAs like 4.99/5.00 and they're not ranked first, whereas I have a 4.94/5.00 and I'm ranked first. Does GPA or rank matter more, or do colleges consider GPAs for each school separately?</p>
<p>Schools take everything into consideration: UW gpa, rigor of coursework, rank, competitiveness of HS, what is offered at HS, test scores, etc. They assess students within their own HS and with applicants from other HSs.</p>
<p>They can’t assess applicants with just one metric.</p>
<p>Depends on the college or university.</p>
<p>For example, Texas public universities consider class rank but not GPA, while California public universities consider GPA (calculated by their specification) but not class rank. And private universities and other public universities are all over the place in how they consider your high school record.</p>
<p>^Thanks, it’s late and I just assumed the OP was asking about privates. Time for bed.</p>
<p>Not all schools rank their students. I would assume that the university AO’s have enough data over the decades to benchmark the relative competitiveness of HS’s and weight the GPA’s accordingly (i.e. a 3.5 at an elite prep school is harder to attain than a 3.5 at a school in a socio-economically disadvantaged district)</p>