How Much Does Class Rank Really Matter? For example my class only has 50 people, so unless you are in the top 5 then you arent even in the top 10%. I transfered after my freshman year, and during my freshman year we had to take certain classes that werent ap or honors whereas this school all the classes they took were ap or honors. So even though I have as good and in some cases better W GPA as some of the top 10 people in the class I am still ranked below them and I barely fall within the top 25% for my class rank, although my school doesnt formally rank anymore most colleges ask to guess. Its not really something that colleges will be able to tell by looking at my transcript because its not like they have someone else from my school to compare it to and see why. I know it sounds like im just whining but I really do want to know how muhc most colleges actually care about class rank and the percentiles. Thanks
I think colleges will understand since you only have 50 people in your grade.
How competitive is your school? How many people does it usually send to top schools each year?
If your school doesn’t rank anymore, then they would just look at your weighted GPA generally. How does your school rank if it isn’t by weighted GPA? That’s quite peculiar if you have a higher GPA yet a lower class rank.
More important at the Ivies and Ivy likes. Google common data set + name of college. Scroll down to the checklist and if class rank is checked, then it’s important. You’ll see other things like GPA, interest, etc
@Rdtsmith Ivies and such usually say (Class Rank if provided) so if the school doesn’t rank, then the Ivies don’t use the specific ranking for admissions.
That is why schools like yours usually don’t provide ranks
It depends by school as to how much class rank matters. At U Texas it is the most important admission criterion. At Ivies it’s important like just about everything else. If your school uses Naviance you might get a better idea of how students in your situation have done for admissions.
It will hurt a lot for ivies and top privates if you are not in the top 10% of the class, unless you go to a truly exceptional feeder school.
We are actually the first class, so currently we will be the first class to graduate next year, so I don’t really have much to base it off of. Although there is another school in our state that we compete with, kind of our rivals, and sometimes they get better scores than us and sometimes we get better scores than them, but they are one of the top 25 high schools by us news. And when we graduate we won’t have a rank but we will have Magna cum laude, summa cum laude, and cum laude.