DS will attend our state’s residential STEM boarding school for his last two years of high school and the school no longer publishes or calculates class rank. He did well at our local public HS and has placed into higher level courses in all of his STEM courses. Do colleges really look at the detail of the courses he will take or will they simply look at his GPA, SAT, essays and ECs?
Will he need to somehow incorporate the courses into his essays or will the admissions officers that deal with the school know enough about it to look at the courses?
The GC rates his schedule on the rec. The school profile may list GPA range by quintile or decile. If multiple applicants from the school apply to the same college, you can assume that they AO is comparing GPAs.
Over half of US HS’s don’t provide a cardinal/ordinal rank, but the AO can still make some educated directional guesses
And no, he should not waste space discussing his classes or rigor unless a college specific prompt asks him to talk about a course.