i know that you obviously have to be in the top portion of your class to have a decent shot at admissions at the top schools. my question is; do you have to be valedictorian or do admissions officers don’t care as long as you are in the top 1% of your graduating class?
Admissions officers don’t really care about rank as long as you’re in the top 10%. That’s the only metric that counts for USNWR. I don’t think being valedictorian means much.
I suppose but as an international student it would seem like a boost wouldn’t you think?
It depends on the school you are talking about.
The ivies, MIT, Caltech
Well, valedictorian at D’s school got into Brown with a 2040 SAT, no hooks. So I’m saying her 4.0/hard work/valedictorian status helped.
International students have it the worst in terms of admissions chances at the Ivy league schools, MIT and Caltech. MIT’s acceptance rate is like 3% for international students I think?
i understand that but what if you consider the fact that i am not from china, india or S.korea?
At most schools, valedictorians are not selected until after applications have been submitted. Additionally, at least in the US, roughly half of HS’s not longer rank, so the difference between the top 1% and top 5% is pretty imperceptible.
I would say that “valedictorian” is pretty meaningless, since it is a title bestowed long after college applications are due. However, I think class rank - if/when it can be determined by admissions offices - is increasingly important.
Among the top students there is “bunching.” Better test scores, thanks to prep. Better GPAs, thanks to grade inflation. Even better extracurriculars. So how can colleges tell who is truly excellent? I think that comparing students within the context of their own class is one of those ways.
Even if the school doesn’t rank, there are ways - by comparing applications, the school profile, and others - that colleges can make informed assumptions about where a student ranks. And I think being at the top of your class is one of the few ways left for colleges to distinguish among the “bunched” applicants at the top.
Going to repost @skieurope’s comment, which applies very well to the most selective colleges:
“Assuming all other things are equal. A college is unlikely to admit a student from Gambia, for instance, just to put a flag on the map.”
I disagree. At our local public HS, the top 1-2% regularly are accepted to Ivies, Stanford, Duke, MIT, CalTech, etc. Top 3-10%, different results.
I think you’re confusing having a higher GPA and SAT with having a higher class rank @sherpa. The kids with higher GPAs and higher SATs are more likely to also have a higher rank. I don’t think the rank is what got them in, but more likely it’s that the things that got them in contributed to their rank.
Maybe I’m wrong though. The admissions officers I’ve talked to seem to think rank only matters for the top 10%, everything else is about GPA/SAT/ECs.
I don’t see being valedictorian as being super important to college admissions. After all, you don’t actually know if you will be valedictorian until after the application season is over, and pretty much after you’ve been accepted/rejected from your schools. Just a personal story, the valedictorian at our school was denied from the UWash Honors Program whereas I, not the valedictorian, was accepted. I wasn’t far from her, but the point of the story is that being valedictorian doesn’t really matter.
Yes, I’ve heard that said before, too. But don’t get confused by the categories. Some schools could just as easily say “top 5%” or even “top 1%”, but they choose not to for obvious reasons.
Being a Val is not particularly special for college admissions, but you also have to understand the relationship between top schools and top students. Top students tend to be Vals.
I don’t think I’m confused, as I didn’t bring up SATs at all and I’m quite comfortable with my understanding of how higher GPA affects class rank.
Lack of confusion aside, where we disagree is that you seem to believe that USNWR’s arbitrary 10% threshold has been universally adopted by elite schools as “good enough” and that as long as an applicant has cleared that bar, where they stand within that top 10% is meaningless.
I disagree, and I provided factual anecdotal support for my belief. If you can provide a statement from an admissions officer at an elite school that top 10% is equivalent, in their eyes, to top 1%, I’ll stand corrected, at least for that school.
Valedictorian is for bragging rights as well as making a speech during graduation
I assumed @JustOneDad meant it depends on the high school since, even if that’s not what he meant, that’s also very true.
Yes, it depends on the high school you are talking about. If there are a whole lot of really bright kids in a high school graduating class, they can’t all be top 10%. There are some elite high schools where students outside the top 10% are accepted to Ivies and other top-ranked colleges. That is why the HS profile sheet that accompanies every student’s transcript is so important.
Do you think colleges would even use class rank if there was no incentive behind it? Many colleges only factor in class rank because it’s a USNWR metric.
For anecdotal evidence, I know of a kid who was around my rank who was accepted to Columbia (I was ranked in the top 10%, but not top 5%), and a kid ranked lower than I was who was accepted to Penn. Plenty of kids ranked above the top 10% from my school but not in the top 1-5% are accepted to schools like Duke, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, etc, but I have friends who were ranked in the top 5% of my class who were accepted (and are attending) to schools ranked significantly lower than those such as Georgia Tech.
The smartest kid I know wasn’t valedictorian or salutatorian of the graduating class, but he is an excellent programmer and has some incredible experience under his belt in CS and was accepted to MIT (he’s attending Cornell because of the ED agreement). His average was maybe 1 point out of 100 higher than mine and his SAT scores were very comparable to mine, but his ECs and outside activities are what got him into the top schools.
It’s kind of pointless to debate this though since there are really no statistics about it. The fact that most colleges don’t publish how many valedictorians they accept or what percentage of their class is top 5% leads me to believe it’s not particularly important and they’re just using it as a stat to boost their USNWR ranking.