<p>If there were multiple students from a high school applying to the same college, does the college compare the students?</p>
<p>Or is there a limit according to how many students they may admit from the same high school?</p>
<p>Sorry if this has been asked before. </p>
<p>Do a search on this forum on the keyword “quota”. The answer is: they compare you with everyone in your region. And there is no limit.</p>
<p>I don’t think there will be a strict quota from any particular high school if several candidates are strong. But I do believe that they will compare candidates from the same high school. Not only that, but they know the caliber of a high school and the profile of their students. So a regional rep knows that a certain gpa at one school is exceptional, but the same gpa from another school might be only top 30%.</p>
<p>So the short answer is yes, they compare students from the same high school, but no, they don’t have a quota if more than one or two students from the same school applies with equally good stats.</p>
<p>I’m sure they sometimes do look at all students from a particular school, but that’s because it’s easier to evaluate the applications that way. One reader is often assigned to all the students from a particular school so they will all be evaluated equally, plus that reader is often the one most familiar with the school. I do believe that the second reading may be split across multiple readers, however.</p>
<p>Don’t assume only the “strongest” get in from any one school - last year, the weakest of three candidates (by far) was the only one who got into a highly selective school due to a hook. In another case, three widely different candidates got into (and attended) a small school that no one from the HS had ever attended before, though there had been some prior admissions. And three people getting into this school from one HS is highly unusual, so you never know.</p>
<p>The more important class rank is in the college’s admissions criteria, the more you are effectively competing against other applicants from your high school.</p>
<p>Of course colleges compare you to the other applicants from your high school. It’s an apples to apples thing.</p>
<p>I don’t have any inside information, so take this with a grain of salt, but three observations:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Yes, class rank is a factor, but I don’t think that really goes to the OP’s question, which was about a college comparing its applicants, specifically, to one another, rather than considering its applicants’ grades in light of the grades at their high schools generally. If 45 kids in your graduating class have straight As, your 3.8 isn’t the same thing as a 3.8 from a school where that makes you the valedictorian. There are a few schools out there that make a normal practice of giving out Bs and Cs.</p></li>
<li><p>Colleges do, to some extent, compare you to former students from your high school. If they accepted some kids who all got 4.0s in high school, and they all got mostly Cs in college, they’re not going to be so impressed by your GPA. In some cases, at least, this is done as a matter of policy, and the admissions office keeps school-by-school statistics and adjusts GPAs accordingly. Of course, if you’re from a small public high school in Arkansas and you’re applying to Williams or somewhere, this may not even come into play.</p></li>
<li><p>It must depend on the high school. If they’re looking at three legitimate candidates from one high school, it may not matter: they could take one or three, and nobody will even notice the difference. If they’re looking at 30, maybe they might ask, “Do we really want that many freshman from that one school?” Of course, there are high schools with pretty disproportionate representation at highly selective colleges, but they’re high schools that are themselves highly selective.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>One other somewhat random throw-in: in New York City, St. Ann’s has one of the best (or the best, depending on how you eyeball it) records in college placement. It doesn’t even give out grades.</p>