<p>I recently got kicked off the top 10% because of an annoyingly unfair WHAP class. While I do think its possible for me to make the top 10% again, the gaps are getting huge and it's very likely I won't make it even with all A's. I might make it by the end of senior year but college decisions will already probably be finalized by then.</p>
<p>I once was confident that I had a chance of going to top schools, but looking at this....</p>
<p>Rice - students in the top 5% is 86%, which probably means that the top 10% makes up about 95% of the class.
Vanderbilt - 89% in the top 10%
Ucla - 97% in the top 10%
Berkeley - 98% in the top 10%
Brown - 94% in the top 10%
Penn - 96% in the top 10%.
WashU St. Louis - 93% in the top 10%
Columbia - 92% in the top 10%.
Cornell - 88% in the top 10%.</p>
<p>Looking at these stats are severely demoralizing - I'm an asian and not an athlete or legacy. My ecs are very good but not outstanding. My act scores are decently good (34 cumulative), but man. It's frustrating because my rank is only low because of freshmen year and one awful WHAP class. </p>
<p>I can almost guarantee you that the tiny amount of students filling those "not top%" are athletes legacies and URMs. </p>
<p>I know they look at the "whole student", but they seem to be VERY stringent on rank. Statistically speaking, I pretty have less than a 1% chance to get into UCLA/Berkeley with their surprisingly high rank percentages..</p>
<p>Should I just aim for less prestigious schools?</p>
<p>They look at rank to gauge what your grades mean in the context of your school. So if you earn all As but 1 B and aren’t in the top 10% then your As won’t mean much to the colleges in the grand scheme of things. While I wouldn’t rule out any top schools, I definitely would add a few more safeties or matches that you would be happy attending.</p>
<p>And many URMs that attend these institutions are in the top 10%, but you would be right in saying that they do get a little bit of a slide regarding scores and grades which isn’t exactly a bad thing.</p>
<p>I wish you the best though!</p>
<p>SHM. A lot of cc’ers are hostile against URM’s. However to be honest I’m a urm and wasn’t in the 10%. But I was in the top 11%. I’m sure if you’re close it won’t matter much at all. </p>
<p>It depends, are you applying to colleges next year? Will your school recalculate rank after this semester? If you’re an underclassman, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. You still have time. </p>
<p>Good luck! </p>
<p>OP- relax!
approximately 50% of High Schools [ especially the private HS’s] DO NOT rank their students. So you are looking a a very incomplete set of data. Rank is NOT nearly as important as the rigor of the classes , your GPA, your test scores and EC’s , etc etc. Those are the important factors that adcoms look at. So keep up the hard work and dont fixate on your rank. It wont make or break your chances, even at many highly competitive colleges.
Be sure you have some true safeties- colleges that you can afford and where you are likely to be accepted [ where your GPA and test scores are above the 75% AND whcih accept 50% of applicants].
Good luck. </p>
<p>It will depend on how competitive your school is. Remember, many schools also do not rank their student. So for a school that has 95% freshmen are top 10% in their high school, it does not necessarily means the remaining 5% are all below the top 10%.</p>
<p>I think the college will take the size of your senior class into question too. If you’re graduating with 500 other people, not being in the top 10% means that you’re not in the top 50 kids, which won’t look so good to colleges. On the other hand, if you’re at a high school where each senior class has 60 kids in it, then not making the top 10% is understandable, because being in the top 5-6 kids isn’t easy. </p>
<p>Unless you’re an extraordinarily compelling candidate, being outside the top 10% will be a death sentence at top schools. They want that percentage to be as high as possible, and the majority of students in their applicant pools are in the top 10%. I remember seeing a statistic at Williams saying that 92% of their applicants are in the top 10%, but only 90% of their freshmen.</p>
<p>That said, I’m barely in the top 20% at my school (with a 103% average). However, I go to one of the best public schools in the country, where students are drawn from a large city through an application process. Also, my high school doesn’t send rank to colleges, unless we request them to (which I didn’t). And I was accepted to two of HYPS as well as Columbia, and Williams, Amherst, and Pomona. </p>
<p>So, basically, you need to try really hard to get back into the top 10%, unless your high school doesn’t report rank. </p>
<p>I am not in the top 10% in my class of 652 students, but I was accepted this year to (of the schools you have listed) Berkeley, UCLA, and Columbia. I was wait-listed at Harvard (which, by the way, doesn’t name class rank as one of the factors it evaluates). I’m not an URM.</p>
<p>I remember being in your position and crying to my counselor about all my chances at my dream school being ruined by having “second decile” listed on my application. It seemed incredibly unfair that I was at such a competitive disadvantage with a 3.8+ unweighted and 4.4 weighted GPA (which, really, would have been good enough to be top 10% at a less-hypercompetitive school). End of story, it’s a holistic process and if your “subjective” attributes outweigh your “objective” stats (I did have a 2340 SAT score, though…), then you probably still have a chance. Best of luck!</p>
<p>“Class Rank” is pretty meaningless. As a previous post noted, roughly half of all high schools decline to rank. Others do so exclusively on the basis of an unweighted GPA, and so students in the most demanding classes often have a lower rank, although colleges will weight that B+ in an AP or IB course as a 4.3. Don’t worry about it unless all of those ranked ahead of you have similar or better test scores, with equally demanding curricula, and are applying to the same colleges as you. </p>