I am currently 40/540 going into sophomore year. Is it impossible to aim #10 ? Has anyone gotten that high from where I am at? Knock off 30 ?
It is going to be different at every school because weighting is different everywhere. Also, you never really know what is on other students transcripts.
Why the focus on rank? Are you in a state that auto admits students into it’s state colleges? Do you need a high rank for a particular scholarship? That’s understandable.
Rankings can be gamed, though. Colleges know this. No one in our high school gets honors points for being in band or chorus, yet top colleges value those talents. Students can pack in honors classes to jump ahead, but find out a couple years later their favored ivy is in desperate need of some trombone players.
Unless you have a reason to worry about rank, focus on taking the hardest classes that you can do well in. So many high schools have given up reporting rank too. Make sure you are chasing the right goal.
I am really terrible at any art or sport related ECs. I have taken up being in clubs for 4 yrs (same 2-3 ones) and trying to be an officer and take part in competitions. I was in JV Soccer, no good. I am taking choir as a sophomore and I know I suck and probably will be in the JV team and wont pursue it after sophomore. So I am hoping rank and my summer activities will help my resume. Yes, my state considers auto for top 7-10% which I will get in, but I am aiming T30 and I was also inspired by top 10 when I watched the grad ceremony of my HS. I know 2 from that list, they are both friends via my parent’s social circle.
Our experience has been that some selective colleges place less emphasis on class rank since a) not all schools do it and b) they don’t calculate gpa the same way. Our HS, for example, calculates gpa on a 100-point, non-weighted scale. D20 was able to increase her cumulative gpa over 2 points (from a 94.459 at the end of 10th grade to a 96.8 halfway through 12th) but her rank only improved from 26/289 to 20/289 in the same timeframe as some students took fewer classes as they met requirements or fewer AP classes. She was able to get into a top 20 LAC while a friend with a higher rank and gpa was rejected and is going to a top 100 regional college (the only non-public school that accepted her) and their GC said it was because she lacked a rigorous schedule.
Do you live in Texas, and are you trying to get into the top 6% to get into UT Austin?
@ucbalumnus , yes if I dont get into T30 including Rice.
You will have to look at how your high school determines rank. Often, it is some weighted GPA calculation. Some students try to find ways to game the weighted GPA to improve their rank, even at the cost of not being able to take a desired unweighted elective or some such. But it is likely that other students are trying to game the weighted GPA and rank system, so any gaming you do may just leave you in the same place relative to everyone else trying to game the system.
It really depends not only on how your school ranks but also the academic competitiveness. At my D’s HS the top 10% barely changed from freshman to senior year.
Like people have said it really depends on your school. Try to get to know (or just find out their gpa) of people in the 30’s range 20’s range 10’s an everyone thats top 5. Its definitely possible to move up by 10 on rank. My freshman year first semester i was 21/661 then my second semester i was 3/618(some kids moved or were removed)
My kiddo went from 54 to 17 between his sophomore and rising Senior year. It helps because he took dual enrollment classes exclusively for the last 3 semesters, which raised him significantly.
However, the top 10 kids are just shuffling themselves but have yet to change.
As everyone keeps saying it really depends on how your school determines rank. At my D’s school the only thing that increased your GPA (which is what rank was based on) were AP classes. Honors didn’t help and neither did dual enrollment. My D was ranked high but she made a decision early on she wasn’t going to play the ranking game and make all her course decisions based on rank. Her senior year she took a dual enrollment course knowing that some of the kids with similar ranking would be taking another AP instead. And her rank did drop slightly as we expected.
I only know which kids were ranked in the top 5 or so in her class. The schools those 5 went to really varied from a T100, a highly ranked LAS, a T20, and a T50. In the long run I’m not sure ranking mattered a lot in terms of where they ended up though I am certain finances played a big decisions in their outcomes.
The top 10 in my school have ended up in Harvard, Yale, MIT, UT, UC Berkley, GeorgiaTech and Rice. @underr8dmacarony wow! that is a incredible jumo.
They didn’t get there by being in the top 10 students, they did it by having high stats, and great ECs, and possibly by being legacies. The colleges where they ended up would not have changed if 10 additional students would have also had stats which were just as great, and some or all of those 10 would have been pushed down to the top 20 them across the top 20 instead. Well, if you are in Texas, the UT admission could have been affected if the person had the same stats but was no longer in the top 6%.
What you should do is to do as best as you can. However, do not make college admissions the entire focus of your high school years. It is a bit sad if you sacrifice your four years of high school for the low chance of getting into one of 20 colleges, without even knowing that those would be the best places for you.
Don’t decide that you need to be accepted to a prestigious college, and spend your four years trying to emulate kids who ended up attending those colleges. Do your best at studies, invest in extracurricular activities, but choose your courses based on what you want to do with your life, and choose your extracurriculars based on your interests, passions, and goals.
You should choose a college based on who you are and what you want to do after college, not decide who you are based on colleges which you now, as a rising sophomore, thing are The Best Colleges.
So my Final transcript of the Freshman year, my rank dropped from 40/539 to 43/546
I am so close to getting knocked off the top 10%, makes me extremely nervous.