<p>I am suspicious of data given out for a number of schools. Class ranks and GPA are particularly not indicative of the students in a school. I cannot believe that it is mathematically possible for so many students to be in the upper 10% of their class when one looks at the stats of a large number of colleges.</p>
<p>It is common in marketing materials for colleges to talk about the stats of their admitted students, if those average stats are much higher than for enrolled students. Many high school students don’t know the difference.</p>
<p>cptof as was previously stated just about all private schools and most magnet schools do not report class rank. While they wont tell you this the primary reason they don’t rank is because colleges dont want them to. why is that-because in the quest for “holistic” admissions combined with the need to rank highly on us news rankings, colleges want to admitt non top 10% kids and not have it count against them.
This combination of “holistic” admissions and the need to rank highly on us news has created a complete mess.</p>
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<p>That is highly doubtful as colleges DO value the information provided by the class ranking. In turn, high schools have all kind of incentives to avoid disclosing rankings, with pleasing the Lake Wobegon residents as the highest priority. </p>
<p>Remember for many, education is all about making people feel good!</p>
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<p>Well, I’m not so sure. About 3.2 million students graduate high school per year in the U.S., so in principle, about 320,000 should be in the top 10% of their HS class. One problem is that not every HS ranks, so the number should be a bit smaller, but that’s still an awful lot of students in the top 10% of their class. About 70% of those 3.2 million HS graduates will enroll in college, so that’s about 2.2 million college freshmen, but this includes part-timers and those enrolling in community colleges. First-time, full-time freshmen in 4-year institutions represent about 60% of the same-year HS grads attending college; the other 40% go to public or private 2-year institutions. So that’s about 1.3 million enrolled as first-time, full-time freshmen in 4-year colleges. If you assume most of the 320,000 (or so) who graduated in the top 10% of their HS class are in that 1.3 million enrolled as full-time freshmen, they could in principle make up nearly 1/4 of the freshmen. So I don’t think the overall numbers reported in the top 10% are so fantastical, especially when you consider that the schools reporting a high percentage in the top 10% are concentrated in the top 50 or so colleges and universities in the country. </p>
<p>Even by the time you get to, say, #42 Wisconsin, only 56% are reported to be in the top 10% of their HS class. High schools in Wisconsin produce about 63,000 graduates a year, so that’s 6,300 graduates per year in the top 10% of their HS class. Freshman enrollment at UW Madison is about 5,900, of whom 57%, or about 3,300, were in the top 10% of their HS class. But 1/3 of Wisconsin’s freshmen come from out-of-state, so that’s about 2,200 of Wisconsin’s 6,300 top-10% HS grads enrolling as freshmen at the state flagship, or about 1 in 3. That strikes me as entirely plausible.</p>
<p>By the time you get down to #55 Michigan State, only 29% were in the top 10% of their HS class, about what you’d expect from what is generally regarded as the second-best, but still quite strong, public university in a larger state. And so on. </p>
<p>Here’s where I get suspicious: some schools claim a very low percentage of their students report a class rank. How can it be, for example, that Harvard gets a class rank for 68% of its entering students (of whom 95% were in the top 10% of their class), while at Princeton only 29% of entering students report a class rank (of whom 99% were in the top 10% of their class)? Really? Only barely over 1 in 4 Princeton freshman went to a HS that ranks, while at Harvard it’s nearly 7 in 10? Are the student bodies from those two school drawn from such radically different demographics? I just really have my doubts, and the doubts, I must say, are more about Princeton.</p>
<p>Yale is down there with Princeton, only 34% report a class rank. Columbia says 80% do. Chicago 69%. MIT 49%; Duke 44%; Stanford 41%.</p>
<p>At the other extreme, Penn says 100% report a class rank. Really? They don’t admit anyone from a school that doesn’t rank?</p>
<p>It’s baffling. The only explanation I can think of (other than that some of these numbers are just made up) is that some schools, like Princeton, somehow make it clear that reporting your class rank is optional, even if you have one; while at the other extreme, perhaps Penn asks applicants to estimate their class rank, even if the school doesn’t rank. But if either or both of those things is true, then US News (which weighs a college’s percentage of entering freshmen in the top 10% of their HS class pretty heavily in its ranking system) isn’t comparing apples to apples. “Class rank optional” would tend to work just like SAT/ACT optional: those who would elect to self-report would be heavily skewed toward those who thought that particular self-reported number would help them, so the percentage in the top 10% of HS class would skew high, just as SAT/ACT scores skew high at test-optional schools. And if Penn or some other school is asking applicants to self-report their own estimate of what their class rank would be—well, that’s roughly the equivalent of telling an applicant, “If you didn’t take the SAT, tell us what you think your SAT scores would have been had you taken it , and we’ll consider that in our admission decision.”</p>
<p>xiggi in my opinion what is the absolute prime driving force of most private high schools is getting their kids in the top schools. Because that is what parents of these kids are looking for so you are right they are looking to please parents but at the end of the day if you can get your kids in the right schools people are going to beg you to take their kid. So you as a private school do whatever you have to to please those schools.</p>
<p>Isn’t parental pressure the main reason privates don’t rank? Half of the kids would place in the bottom half at any school, and parents paying tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition don’t want colleges to see that 75% of students at Andover Prep did better than their Johnny.</p>
<p>The seemingly high numbers of top 10% students could reflect the fact that many public school parents are unwilling to spend large sums of money on a private education when they know that their kid wasn’t an academic star in high school. Plenty of parents figure that the local state school or community college is fine for a kid with a B average (an A average too for that matter). Their child didn’t do well in high school, so why pay the extra tuition for a private education when the school just down the road seems to be sufficient? Plenty of parents with a high achieving student think their child should be challenged more, and are therefore willing to sacrifice a bit more to send their A student to a fancy private or state flagship.</p>
<p>And Cptofthehouse, many colleges recalculate GPAs with their own criteria and then report that on admissions brochures. I know Oxford College of Emory does that, and I believe Emory may do the same thing (not sure though). My Oxford recalculated GPA was higher than my unweighted hs transcript GPA.</p>
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<p>Well you can add one to the your list! </p>
<p>Baffling is the word that aptly defines the upwards trend in the class rank reported by Columbia, one of the schools that excel when it comes to selective reporting.</p>
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<p>Oh, for the same New York school, I would say that the best explanation that some of these numbers are just made up. A probability that becomes an almost certainty at schools that never bother to release their CDS to the public at large.</p>
<p>Everyone is above average, and all 50 states report median reading scores above the national average.</p>
<p>Never did understand the new math.</p>
<p>(I don’t see why they need all that stuff anyway. Just select the class by local real estate values, and then just throw in a bunch from Bulgaria, uh, I mean, Kansas.)</p>
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<p>That’s part of it, but only part. I think there’s also a tacit understanding that Princeton doesn’t want Andover to rank, because if Andover ranked then Princeton could only admit people in the top 10% of Andover’s class, and Princeton would like to go deeper than that because there really are a lot of top-notch students at Andover (as well as some athletes Princeton would like to recruit who may not be in the top 10% of Andover’s class, either).</p>
<p>The calculation is very simple: percentage of entering freshmen in the top 10% of their HS class counts for 6% of a college’s US News rating (40% of the 15% of the total rating that is determined by “selectivity”). That’s huge; it makes HS class rank almost as important as SAT/ACT scores (7.5%) in the US News ranking. Princeton is currently tied with Harvard for the #1 spot in the US News rankings, based in part on the fact that Princeton currently reports that 99% of its freshmen were in the top 10% of their HS class (though that’s based in turn on class ranks reported by only 29% of Princeton’s entering class). Harvard and Princeton have identical rating scores of 100 (assigned as the arbitrary starting point for the top-scoring school or schools). But since Harvard reports “only” 95% of its entering class were in the top 10% of their HS class and it ties Princeton in overall score, that must mean Harvard scores higher in some other areas. So if Princeton let its reported percentage in the top 10% slip to Harvard’s level—horrors, all the way down to 95%!—then Princeton would slip behind Harvard in the US News ranking, and maybe even fall behind currently #3-ranked Yale (overall US News score 98, with 97% of freshmen in the top 10% of their HS class).</p>
<p>That means if Princeton cares about its US News ranking (and however much they deny it, they do care), they’ll be looking exclusively at students in the top 10% of their HS class, along with students from schools that don’t rank. And since both Andover and Princeton believe there are students in the second, third, maybe even fourth and fifth deciles at Andover who deserve a close look by Princeton and similar schools, Andover’s not going to rank, and that will be just fine with Princeton, probably even preferable. Now some top public high schools have caught on, and they’re not ranking, either.</p>
<p>Despite all this, I don’t think HS class rankings are ready to go the way of the buggy whip, at least not yet. Most HS students still attend public high schools, and most of those schools are not competitive/selective enough to do away with class rank; if they did it would probably hurt their top students more than it helped them. Here in my home city, for example. St. Paul Central High School is clearly the top-performing public high school in the city as measured by academic performance at the top of the class. But the school is not uniformly strong; it’s really just the kids at the top end of the class who take all the APs and earn the top grades and produce the top SAT/ACT scores and are leaders in meaningful ECs who get into Ivies and other highly selective schools (if they choose to apply; some elect to attend the University of Wisconsin where Minnesotans get tuition reciprocity, others choose to attend the Honors College at our own state flagship). For those kids, from that school, class rank is only going to help them in college admissions; and not only the val and sal, but anyone in the top 10%, because colleges really are chasing after those top 10%-ers to try to boost their US News rankings. And it’s that way for top students at most public high schools across the nation.</p>
<p>emory is under a lot of pressure leave them alone!</p>
<p>I think the chief effect of doing away with class ranks is to make the communication of evaluative information completely private and, thus, to put control in the hands of the administrators. Class ranks can be calculated without publishing them, keeping many interested parties happy, but still privately communicated between secondary school and college admissions offices. Alternatively, if rankings are not objectively calculated (or even if they are!) then they are subjectively estimated, giving even more control to prep school administrators who share their opinions with their contacts “upstream.” What keeps the prep schools from recommending everyone is their need to protect their reputations. They selectively endorse students now because they want their endorsements to be valued in the future.</p>
<p>In effect there are two sets of books being kept, with only the insiders knowing the real story.</p>
<p>" And since both Andover and Princeton believe there are students in the second, third, maybe even fourth and fifth deciles at Andover who deserve a close look by Princeton and similar schools, Andover’s not going to rank, and that will be just fine with Princeton, probably even preferable."</p>
<p>Or maybe not. Perhaps it is Princeton (and the others) who instructed Andover not to rank. (But they can still rank based on real estate values.)</p>
<p>“Just a sliver of the many thoughts that run through my head on the economic and moral decay of America.”</p>
<p>My only argument is with the word “decay,” which implies that our morals used to be fresh and sweet-smelling. The history of 19th-century commerce contradicts that idea. There have always been shysters selling rotten products and lying about it.</p>
<p>Just to correct some misinformation, Princeton’s latest common data set available says that 93% are in the top decile of their high school class and 99% are in the top quarter. It also says that 100% reported their class rank which is obviously a mistake because the year before it said 23% reported class rank (of which 95% were in the top decile).</p>
<p><a href=“http://registrar.princeton.edu/university_enrollment_sta/common_cds2011.pdf[/url]”>http://registrar.princeton.edu/university_enrollment_sta/common_cds2011.pdf</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://registrar.princeton.edu/university_enrollment_sta/common_cds2010.pdf[/url]”>http://registrar.princeton.edu/university_enrollment_sta/common_cds2010.pdf</a></p>
<p>I understand the issues the colleges are facing with class ranks and gpas. There are schools where, most of the students are preselected to the point that any of them are likely good candidate for the top schools. One independent school I know in this area do get kids even in the 3rd quintile into Ivy League Schools whereas in many school districts those spots are reserved for the top ten graduates, and I intentionally left off the % sign. Also some schools do not weight grades and have a steep curve. For certain independent schools in particular, and some of the better known school districts, a lot of the top colleges are aware of this and have a whole other set of standards for those kids. Michele Hernandez in her “A is for Admissions” touches on this when she defines how the numbers are churned in the admissions process of many selective schools. There is a whole other chart to calculate the Academic Index which is so important in this process.</p>
<p>One way that class rank gets boosted is because of the rank-optional transcripts. Some schools give the student the choice to decide if things like SAT scores, AP scores, and class rank should be included in the transcript. Through self selection, you’re likely to have more of the high ranks listed.</p>
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<p>The “misinformation” comes directly from US News which apparently used the 99% figure to calculate Princeton’s overall rating and #1 ranking (tied with Harvard) for the 2012 online edition. I don’t know whether the mistake was Princeton’s or US News’. It could be that Princeton filed a “corrected” 2010-11 Common Data Set after initially publishing one with the 99% figure. Or it could be just a transcription error on US News’ end. In either case, there’s every reason to believe US News used the 99% figure in calculating Princeton’s ranking because that’s the figure that shows up in the US News online database, which probably means in turn if the correct figure had been used, Princeton would not have been tied with Harvard and might possibly have slipped behind Yale (which did in fact report 97% of its freshmen in the Fall of 2010 were in the top 10% of their HS class).</p>
<p>[Common</a> Data Set (CDS) | Office of Institutional Research](<a href=“http://oir.yale.edu/common-data-set]Common”>Common Data Set | Office of Institutional Research)</p>
<p>^ Hmmm, The link you gave is for Yale university! Yale’s freshman class had 97% from the top decile for the past two years, above both Princeton and Harvard and yet it still was number 3 in US News rankings. Go figure.</p>
<p>Princeton has been ranked first or second in US News every year for at least the past ten years, often tying with Harvard and sometimes alone in the top spot. Your implication that Princeton manipulated its data for the latest ranking to best Harvard is totally unfounded. IF there is any data fudging going on at those levels (something I personally doubt), there is no evidence that it is going on at one school more than another. I believe all of them have been transparent with their CDS profiles going back many years.</p>
<p>Please do post the link where it gives the 99% in the top decile figure for Princeton, a non-fact that has now been cited in several posts. I believe had that figure actually been submitted, the magazine itself would have questioned it and asked for confirmation.</p>
<p>Sorry, bclintok, too late to edit, but I see why you were posting the Yale link. I still would like to see evidence that U.S. News used the 99% figure (copy and paste from the data base, maybe?), as I would try to contact them myself if it appears that way.</p>
<p>In any case, I think you are supposing far too much weight for that one data point, just like many people erroneously believe that a few points difference in the admit rate of a school is going to affect its stand in the rankings. The wealth of a school and peer assessment are the major movers in the U.S. News list.</p>