<p>I'm a junior, and </p>
<p>Basically, our school ranks by gpa,
and gpa is done with honors/AP classes getting 1 more additional point, and A+ getting 0.3 points more. </p>
<p>Those ranked 1st, and 2nd have the exact same grades as me in all the major subjects not including electives (so english, foreign language, social studies, science, math)</p>
<p>However, I am ranked 3rd because I didn't take the only honors elective offered to freshman and sophomores (Journalism Honors 1 and 2) while 1st and 2nd did, and pursued my interests in a different, more rigorous course that doesn't carry honors credit. This means they got 2 additional points than me, which gave their GPAs a significant boost. </p>
<p>Many colleges list class rank as a very important factor, and would this work against me in anyway? After all 1st sounds so much better than 3rd.</p>
<p>When colleges talk about rank they mean in broad terms like “top 10%” or "top 5%. Often that is the lowest they go, but there are some schools that will then break it down to “top 4%”, “3%”, “2%”, and “1%”. Being 3rd instead of 1st won’t hurt you at all.</p>
<p>I’d say it’s pretty important. In some cases, it tells a college how strong academically you are relative to other students in the school if the school’s grading policy is weird and in other cases it either validates your GPA or tells colleges what your GPA means for that class.</p>
<p>It won’t have much of an effect. They’ll see your transcript and see that you got all As and take that into account when seeing that you’re 3rd instead of 1 or 2 which is not a big difference.</p>
<p>I agree with TV4caster on this one. Class rank is very important indeed, but every college is very aware of the idiosyncrasies of each school’s GPA calculation. For that reason, they take rank into account in the broad way described by TV4caster. If your rank is that high, then I’m sure your GPA will bear out your merit to any adcom.</p>
<p>Ok! This is great news, thank you so much !</p>
<p>It depends on the university. For example, rank is much more important at the University of Texas than the University of California.</p>