how do you know how good your high school is?

<p>i see in a lot of posts that people are saying that "i come from a really good high school", and i was wondering, how do you know if your high school is that good compared to others in the state/nation? is it how many you send to ivies? avg sat scores? what...</p>

<p>Typically it's how many people the school sends to ivies (AKA level of competitiveness), but it depends.</p>

<p>If your high school was that good, you would probably know it.</p>

<p>Last year my school sent 1 girl to Yale, 1 girl to UPenn, and 1 guy to Cornell. Thats all the people who got into Ivies...what does that say about my school?</p>

<p>My school last year sent 6 to Cornell, 1 to Harvard, 1 to Yale, 1 to Duke, 1 to Dartmouth, and thats about all the top schools.</p>

<p>well, it depends what percentage of people go to top schools, not how many. for example, if i told you i go to a college prep school and it sent one person to cornell last year, it doesn't seem all that amazing. but if i tell you that the graduating class had about 40 people, than the one person (my sister) doesn't seem so small.</p>

<p>but yea, you can usually tell how good your school is based on the percentage that go to top schools, unless it is a school that does not focus on college (i know some schools that are very artsy and the students often don't go to college, but become some sort of artist after hs). for very top high schools though, there are rankings published or they are just known for being amazing (such as Palo Alto High School or Trinity).</p>

<p>We know our high school is good because the rest of the county hates us.</p>

<p>Our school's test grades
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One other school's test grades (unsurprisingly the one with the richest kids and fewest minorities)
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The rest of the county.</p>

<p>well it is #14 in the nation according to newsweek, sure that's not the ultimate decider, but it gives a fair comparison.</p>

<p>I know mine is not good at all because I don't know of any students who went higher in prestige than OSU.</p>

<p>My school isn't even ranked in any of those surveys or whatever. Last year, 1 to Stanford, 1 to Brown, and 1 to UPenn/Wharton.</p>

<p>About 75% of our class either goes to U of I, Illinois State, DePaul, UIC, or a community college.</p>

<p>It's not competitive unless you're one of the top 15 students out of a class of 665.</p>

<p>The last 3 years the valedictorians in my school have gone to Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.</p>

<p>My school is ranked like 30 or so in NJ (it fluctuates from 15ish to 45ish). Obviously not top in the country, but certainly competitive (coming from a competitive state)</p>

<p>Search google: (your state) high school rankings, lots of sites have their own rankings.</p>

<p>ok yeah I just found out my high school is pretty much an average school. It's 71st in state (IL), and Illinois is extrmely competitive so I think it could be classified as semi-competitive I guess.</p>

<p>too bad my school is new, so i have no idea how good it is</p>

<p>The question is: how do you know how "bad" your high school is.</p>

<p>I believe my highschool has the most students enrolled in the Nation. Yup, in the whole entire Nation. I live in FL.</p>

<p>Haha, okay, then my school pretty much sucks. In the past five years, we've had one person go to Harvard... and her parents probably paid for her to get in. </p>

<p>However, we do have one of the best music programs in the state... does that count for anything? (:</p>

<p>Eh, my school's awesome, supposedly. I say it's just because it's a public magnet school, so they picked who came. Last year we've had 2 for Harvard, 1 for MIT, 1 for Stanford, 2 for Columbia, 1 for Cornell, 1 for Duke, 1 for Johns Hopkins, and a few to other top schools. This was out of a class of 60.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12532678/site/newsweek/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12532678/site/newsweek/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>If it's ranked somewhere there, it's probably pretty good. Even better if it's in the top 500, 100, 50, so on.</p>

<p>I never heard of that obscure survey until several weeks ago, and my hs isnt on there -___-</p>

<p>lol, my high school had in bold letters on their webpage "--HS NAMED AMOUNG NATION'S BEST"</p>

<p>it was impossible to miss.</p>