I am a junior and I am ranked in the top 15% of my class. I have a GPA of 4.6 and have taken 7 AP classes so far and plan to take 5 APs in senior year.
Will my class rank hurt me and should I apply to the Ivies?
Do you have an ACT or SAT score?
Can you afford to attend the Ivies? Why the Ivies…and top 20 schools?
Please take this very free advice. Build your college application list from the bottom up. Find a couple of sure things for admission that you would be happy to attend and are affordable. Then build up from there.
Remember, most of those top 20 schools have admission rates hovering around 10%. Do the math. 90% of applicants don’t get accepted. And if you do or don’t get accepted you will never know the reason why.
Absolutely apply to a couple of reach schools if you want to…but get a good solid list of sure things and very possibles for admission first.
Oh…and find out what your parents are willing to pay annually.
6 Likes
The Ivy League is an athletic conference. Find schools that fit YOU. What do you want to study? Big school/small school? Open curriculum? Core curriculum? Liberal arts? STEM? Research opportunities? Greek life? Weather? East coast/west coast/
Midwest/South? Cost of attendance? Need merit? Etc. Etc. Etc.
So many variables to choosing the right school for you! Don’t focus on one set of 8 schools(which are quite different from one another, btw).
2 Likes
Thanks for your response. My ACT is 35.
1 Like
That’s terrific. And your GPA sounds fine too. But remember…the vast majority of students applying to these highly competitive colleges have equally fine stats…or better. And only 10% or so get accepted.
Sure…apply and see. But please lock on some sure things first.
And read this thread…the whole thing. This student was a NMF, top in his class, excellent ECs, and no one expected him to be rejected everywhere, but that’s what happened. And this was over 10 years ago when admissions were less competitive. This thread is a must read for anyone who plans to apply only to elite schools.
Important information pertaining to your question is available through Common Data Sets. For example, at a T20 such as, say, Swarthmore, 89% of attending students for whom high school rank was available placed in top tenth of their graduating classes. This probably means that most students outside of the top tenth of their high school classes would have a low chance of acceptance at Swarthmore.
3 Likes
It depends on what your high school is. If you come from a top private, the top 15% may be ok.
2 Likes
Or a top public.
2 Likes
Like Stuy. Yes.
1 Like
Top 15% in a class of 100. Or top 15% in a class of a thousand?
It all depends. If the school wants you for other reasons (diversity, geography, athletics, etc), then they’d be willing to bend a little on the academics. An ACT of 35 is fine under any circumstances, but top 15% might not be. If you’re coming from a non-selective high school, top 15% is a little low. But if you’re coming from a highly selective exam public school, like Bronx Science or Stuyvesant, or what Boston Latin used to be, or from a highly selective prep school, then top 15% is probably okay.
It’s gotten so competitive for the Ivies and T20s that even a valedictorian with a 36 ACT might not get in, unless they bring something more that the school wants.
3 Likes
It’s important to note that only 36% of matriculating students at Swarthmore submitted rank, which seems high to me. I suspect the OP was asking about Ivies and T20 National USNWR colleges, rather than LACs. These generally have lower % submitting class rank than Swarthmore. For example, only 18% of matriculating students to Cornell submitted rank.
I expect that a notable portion of the 82% of students who did not submit rank attended selective high schools (private or magnet) for which there is a high concentration of high achieving students, which changes the meaning of class rank. A top 10% rank at selective high school A is not the same as the a top 10% rank at non-selective high school B. As such, I wouldn’t assume that you need to match the class rank of the 18% of students who submitted rank.
A better test might be to look at Naviance and see the acceptance rate for various grades among kids who applied from your HS. Continuing with the Cornell example, the HS I attended was in upstate NY, so we had a huge sample of applicants to Cornell. The admit rate was quite decent among students with a ~95% average grade or higher, then drops off quickly as grades decrease, unless hooks are present.
6 Likes
However, the OP should be aware that T20-schools limited to a particular category may not fall within a general T20 list, such as might be approximated by standardized scoring profiles, as in this (unfortunately, flawed) site: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/slideshows/colleges-with-the-highest-sat-scores.
Many selective high schools do not use rank.
1 Like
I honestly don’t think that admission to the schools you say you are interested in, is based on grades and scores- or rank. These schools are assembling a class and want an interesting mix of interests, talents and backgrounds. What do you do for extracurriculars in or out of school?
Make sure you look into a variety of schools. Google
little Ivies" and “Colleges that Change Lives” for examples.
3 Likes
I would echo the advice to look up the Common Data Set questionnaires for each school you might be considering (also to look outside the Ivies and whatever some individual might mean by “Top 20”). In particular, question C7 asks the schools to rank the importance of different criteria, including academic criteria, including class rank. The scale is Very Important, Important, Considered, and Not Considered.
And the answers are not all the same. Harvard, for example, ranks nothing more than Considered, but Class rank is the only academic factor they rank Not Considered. We know from the Harvard admissions lawsuit that Harvard has its own custom way of scoring its applicants academically, and I take it they are saying they are not interested in using reported class ranks as an input into that process.
CalTech doesn’t even mark a box for standardized test scores (they are test blind), but then they rank rigor of school record, application essay, and recommendation as Very Important, Class rank and GPA as only Important. I think they are saying they tend to look for high-level qualifications specific to their fields, but still also prefer generally good students.
Dartmouth, in contrast, ranks all the academic factors Very Important, including class rank. Not a lot of information there, other than that Dartmouth is communicating they take academic qualifications very seriously.
And so on. Knowing this tool exists, you can now look up any school you like and see what it says specifically about class rank. What you will see is schools falling anywhere on this spectrum, from not considered at all, to considered/important but not as important as some other academic factors, to as important as other academic factors.
By the way, our private HS does not rank our applicants, and we have a very good record of placing students at very selective colleges. But I don’t think that means relative course success at our school does not matter.
My understanding is typically admissions officers doing the academic review are familiar with our HS (and/or get good help from our college counselors to that end), so they know what counts as a harder or easier curriculum. They can combined that with grades to rank our applicants for their purposes. We just don’t try to do that for them. Finally, they can then decide for themselves how deep into that pool they will consider our applicants sufficiently academically qualified to be competitive for admissions.
OK, so we send a good number of kids to Dartmouth, say, and Dartmouth says Class rank is Very Important. This isn’t really a contradiction because Dartmouth can rank our applicants for itself, and decide if a given applicant was high enough in that rank to be considered well-qualified academically.
But that’s not the end for Dartmouth. They also rank ECs and Character/Personal qualities Very Important, Talent/Ability Important, and then Consider a long list of other non-academic factors (the only things they say they don’t consider are state residency and religious affiliation). In other words, Dartmouth is a holistic review college, and being academically well-qualified only means they will also assess whether you have both the activities and personal qualities they are seeking.
4 Likes
Many high schools don’t rank…not just selective ones. Our local high school stopped finite ranking in 2005, ranking only in deciles. They completely stopped class ranking a few years later.
3 Likes
Yes, correct. I was responding to the previous poster who used the term “selective”. I think a lot of high schools are going away from rankings and naming valedictorian/salutatorian. How can you quantify kids with a number when a lot of the classes such as English or History have subjective grading on essays and papers?
1 Like
Thank you so much. I didn’t know this even existed. This is very helpful.
I looked up Brown and it said class rank is very important. For Cornell it said important.
However when I looked up Princeton it said N/A
Does this mean they don’t look at class rank?
See website:
So the question I would suggest you look at is C7. Princeton, like Dartmouth, checks all the academic factors, including Class rank, as “Very Important”.
I believe you are looking at C10. In C10, they are asking Princeton to report a class rank breakdown of their class (“for those students from whom you collected high school rank information”), and Princeton is saying that information is Not Available.
I would personally not interpret that as contradicting their statement that Class rank is Very Important. I think they are just saying they have not compiled the data in the way the CDS is asking.
2 Likes