<p>I see people in chance threads saying that they come from very competitive high schools. I've always heard my school described as competitive, but only the top 10 or 15% have GPA's above a 3.5 unweighted. Does this make my school not-competitive? Also, maybe the top 1 or 2 percent get accepted to Ivies every year. My school also doesn't rank, so will this hurt my chances by showing my GPA without the context of my classmates?</p>
<p>There is no real importance to how people characterize their high schools in chance threads. Measures of “competetiveness” are basically meaningless. Your high schools GPA for top 10% being relatively low suggests that there is little grade inflation at your school. </p>
<p>The important piece of information here is that your school routinely sends a few students to Ivies each year - so presumably your guidance counselors are somewhat knowledgeable and your high school is a somewhat known quantity to the Ivies. </p>
<p>It depends on how tough your school is. The competitiveness, I think, isn’t primarily based upon who has the highest UW GPAs within the applicant pool of a school. Every school is different depending on scale, weighting, rigor, etc. The competitiveness comes from the GPAs within your school and the rigor of its curriculum. My school is similar and I like to think it is “competitive”, but its hard to tell because the sampling of students in my class is so small (249, 22% above 3.5 UW) so I bet that if there were 1,000 students, that percentage would go down. </p>
<p>My class size is 225</p>