<p>If Stanford doesn't look at freshmen grades from high school, will they consider class rank in the application process?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>bump this is a good question</p>
<p>I believe the answer is yes; they do look at class rank.</p>
<p>No, Stanford does not, in any way at all, care about your class rank. Stanford, being an elite school, feels that class rank, or how your grades relate to those of your classmates, is completely unrelated to how good of a student you are. Freshman grades clearly have an incredibly large impact on class ranks, so for that reason, they must ignore these in order to be fair to all applicants.</p>
<p>On Stanford’s Common Data Set, class rank is marked as “very important”.</p>
<p>For clarification: Stanford DOES look at class rank.</p>
<p>Stanford Common Data Set 2008-2009: [Stanford</a> University: Common Data Set 2008-2009](<a href=“http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/]Stanford”>Stanford Common Data Set | University Communications).</p>
<p>^ I was about to post that same link : )
Yes, Stanford certainly looks at class rank. They are very interested in how you matched up against your peers who were taking the same/similar classes. However, Stanford does look at other parts of the application, and they are very interested in how you are different/how you set yourself apart. Just make sure you still have excellent grades! At the end of the day, Stanford is still an academic school, after all. : )
With that being said, a terrible class rank is not a guarantee that you won’t get in, nor is a very high class rank a guarantee that you will get in. Stanford does look at extenuating circumstances. My class rank was somewhere around 60 out of 420, because I went to an extremely rigorous east coast private school that sends a ridiculous number of kids to Harvard each year (we’re talking double digits out of a class of ~50 each year) my freshman year, and where I got mostly B’s. (I also had some other traumatic events to deal with, the details of which I would rather not go into detail about on a public forum.) Then, my family moved out west, where I started attending a large public, and where I made all A’s. However, my class rank was awful, thanks to the freshman year grades. Fortunately, Stanford looked closely and saw that there was an explanation for the lower grades, and so they didn’t let that get in the way of accepting me.
But, if you don’t have any special circumstances like that, then make sure your grades are very good. : )</p>
<p>Is class rank or GPA re-calculated just for sophomore and junior years?</p>
<p>No, I’m pretty sure they look at your cummulative class rank.</p>
<p>Class rank is an imp factor but more in top % vs middle of class, etc.</p>
<p>It’s probably a factor, but if you’re in the top 10% of your school, it likely isn’t going to matter that much anymore. Even if many students admitted aren’t at the very bottom of this 10%, I don’t think I see much correlation with being extremely high ranked and getting into Stanford. Which, of course, is probably a good thing, given rank beyond a point just reflects who padded the right classes on. </p>
<p>Once you’re one of the better students in your school, it seems not to matter, and letters of recommendation, soft factors in essays, and extracurriculars will matter much more to my experience.</p>