<p>I keep reading that colleges make a huge deal out of rank, and although I understand why, not all high schools rank. In fact, our entire county does not rank. Much of our county ends up going to the state university, which is good, but basically an SAT/GPA numbers game. Few people apply to top schools. </p>
<p>I think I was reading a Williams brochure that showed that nearly 80% of their matriculants had a rank of 10% (not unusual), but then I think that only a really small percentage got in from a school that does not rank. Do they use this against you, or is it just more likely that if your school does not rank than they are less likely to produce qualified students (that sounds unlikely)?</p>
<p>They definatley prefer a ranking system, but they won’t use it against you. Williams, being smaller than other top schools, is also going to be able to give a little bit more time to your application, so they’ll figure out “where you stand” in your school. They really just want to be able to decipher where you fall in a body of students–top, middle, or bottom. If you can prove that through your GPA and course difficultly and then “prove the worth” of those critera through SAT and AP/IB scores, you’ve done that.</p>
<p>when a school says “X% of matriculants were in the top 10% of their class” what they really mean is “X% of students who submitted a rank were in the top 10% of their class.”</p>
<p>Some high schools only give ranges (e.g., “top 10 percent”) and some give exact numerical ranks. Some high schools don’t say at all, but most colleges expect a teacher or counselor recommendation to speak to the issue of whether the applicant is ordinary or outstanding.</p>
<p>It’s like this. Schools don’t want to rank usually because the high school is big. My high school was really large with my senior class as 700 (something like that). The cut for my school for top 10% is about a 3.90. (approximated, I had a 3.8 gpa and was roughly the 12%) Maybe that is how it is at every school (gpa wise where the cutoffs were), but the high schools don’t want to give someone who had a 4.0 a class rank of 50.</p>
<p>“Do they use this against you” – the business of admissions offices is to find and admit great students. For someone to be so lazy, they’d be terribly unprofessional. Is it possible that someone’s laziness could turn into bias? I suppose – but unranked schools are part of the landscape – I wouldn’t fret.</p>
<p>More and more high schools are moving away from ranking students as 1, 2, 3, etc. That’s because they’ve found kids who are willing to “game” the system by taking easier classes to improve their rank or dropping unweighted classes like art, theater, music because it lowers one’s rank. D’s school gives percentiles & GPAs for the class as a whole, and the student’s GPA, and the colleges figure out what percentile the kid is in. Her school also looks at the GPAs of the top 2 or 3 kids to determine val & sal, but the rest of the student body is unranked.</p>
<p>I agree with chedva above - at a certain point, rank within the top percentile or whatever (depending on the school) becomes a contest of who plays school the best, or even who gets lucky with getting lenient teachers vs. hard-asses, etc. I still think schools would like a percentile rank or at least a decile system, but there are schools in my area that do not rank but consistently dominate college admissions. It’s certainly not a requirement.</p>