<p>Hi everybody. I have a 3.68ish gpa, a 32 ACT, but my class rank is at roughly 22%. My school stopped giving numerical rankings this year.</p>
<p>How will this affect my admissions to selective universities? Is class rank more important than GPA or ACT?</p>
<p>I don’t think class rank is all that important. Many, if not most, high schools (including most elite private schools) do not rank at all. Others rank purely on the basis of unweighted GPAs, and so the highest-ranking students are not necessarily the best qualified academically. At very competitive schools, the differences in GPA between the top 1% and the top 50% can be infinitesimal - boiling down to a science project or math test sophomore year. If someone ranked a few spots above you is applying to the same schools with a 27 ACT, the colleges will probably pick you. If someone in the 27th percentile has a mean forward pass or jump-shot, or is the grandchild of the college’s biggest benefactor, well . . . you know how that will end. . . </p>
<p>I see your point. My issue is that freshman year I took no honors courses, sophomore year I took one, and Junior I took 3 AP and 2 honor. Next year I am taking a lot of them. As a result my weighted gpa isn’t very high (3.75, and 3.68 UW) so there’s a pretty drastic difference from the kids at the top of my class touting their 4.5’s lol. I don’t want colleges to see my class rank and judge it… seeing that some of the universities I am looking at say that up to 90% of their admitted class were in the 10% of their high school classes.</p>
<p>Whenever you see those statistics about class rank, remember that only a relatively small percentage of schools post class rankings. </p>
<p>I actually have to disagree, sorry. Having spent the last several years visiting over 35 colleges (and about 15 of them 3 separate times with kids), over and over and over again we hear the same thing – they look at a student’s course rigor and GPA within the boundaries of his or her school. How did the courses you took compare to the courses that other students took at your school? Many schools do not rank – but on your application, the guidance counselor still has to mark what percentile quadrant you fell within (top 5%, etc.). And they mark down whether you took the "strongest curriculum possible, etc.) This is important because a rep can’t really compare your GPA to the GPA of another school – but they can compare your GPA to the GPA of other students’ in your school. Your school may not offer honors classes freshman and sophomore years or they may offer limited AP classes, or maybe they don’t even weight honors or AP classes. That being said, WEIGHTED gpa is a crock … so do not worry about a weighted GPA unless you are applying to the California UCs or others who use that. Because so many high schools calculate GPA in different ways, I have heard time and time again that the colleges will often recalculate GPA into a 4.0 unweighted scale – then they look at course rigor. So they care that you took challenging courses. But you do want to look at where you fall in your school for your unweighted GPA.</p>