<p>The charter school my son goes to does not provide class rankings. When speaking with our LSO, they advised it was ok and some determination would be made from his grades.</p>
<p>part of the application process is providing the academy with a "School Profile". The profile, as well as his transcripts, will describe how grades and such are determined. Just like some schools have weighted grades for honor's type classes/students; there are some schools that don't weight the grades. The academy figures this into their formula. My son took 4 years of IB; with all advanced classes; yet there were some students taking non-honors classes with the same GPA as him. His grades weren't weighted. The academy had no problem with it.</p>
<p>I don't think it will make any difference if the school doesn't provide class rank. Mine doesn't, and I received my appointment 4 months ago. I'm sure they understand that different schools have different systems and whatnot - which, like afadad said, they can gather from your son's school profile. As long as he's got a solid foundation of leadership experience and does well on the CFA, ACT and DoDMERB tests, class rank won't do him any harm.</p>
<p>My son was in the same position with his charter school; perhaps more so as his school does not have grades either; all they say is a graduate that meets all the requirements is considered to have at least a 3.0. </p>
<p>We were very concerned about how this would impact his whole person score and our perceptions/misconceptions about the process as some unyileding canned formula that our son (actually sons as this is number 2 to go through this) would suffer under.</p>
<p>The process is very competitive and there is really no way to project or anticipate an outcome, all I can say is in the case of both the USNA and now the USAFA, our sons managed to obtain appointments without class rank and grades, I should add from a HS with a typical graduating class of 50 kids. </p>
<p>I would think that SAT and ACT scores would have more weight since some school's weighting of grades and class placement is not standardized. My son was from a small school so he ranked 14 out of 38. That doesn't look so good as far as percentages go, however, he did fairly well on SATs.</p>
<p>I think that thing to keep in mind is that no one thing is going to be the deciding factor. My son was ranked 72nd of 499 in his class. if you only looked at that, you would not be impressed. However, when you consider the school and how competative it is, and that it took a 4.72 just to get to 72nd, it starts to put things into perspective. It is just a small piece of the puzzle.</p>
<p>If a school doesn't rank, then they will use the other pieces to fill in the blanks, but they won't hold it against you. it is becoming more and more common for schools not to rank. I wish the HS where my kids went didn't rank. My DD is now ranked 32/585 and she had to get a 5.04 just to get to 32nd.</p>
<p>My school didn't rank the students either. Granted, I go to a school with 39 kids in my class and at least five of them have straight A's so there goes any good percentile. But I just received my appointment and its all fine now. I wouldn't worry about it.
As a side note, the academy also reconfigures grades as well. My school had a 7 point scale (HORRIBLE, it screws over the students) and I had a 3.2 GPA when taking all the honors and AP courses that I could. I sent my transcript to USAFA and they reconfigured it to ACTUALLY be a 3.75. Just FYI incase anyone is wondering about that too.</p>