What happens if a student moves to an uber competitive school midterm and though they not only maintain but raise their GPA, yet their class rank falls 10-15 places. Their guidance counselors should mention social and academic change as a reason in his rec letter or is it student’s headache?
I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think your rank at the school you left will have any impact. It won’t likely appear on your transcript. Your ranking at the end of senior year is what is important.
Keep in mind that AO’s do consider how competitive a school is, when they consider rank. Being in the top 25% at a very competitive HS, can be of more value than being in the top 10% of a much less competitive HS.
It’s the ranking at the end of Junior year that’s important (not Senior). Agreed that competitiveness of the school will be known to colleges.
My daughter moved from one ubercompetitive school to another, very different one at the start of 11th grade. Old School was an elite private school that did not rank its students, and did not offer any course labeled “AP”. Her GPA there probably put her somewhere around the 90th percentile of her 100-student class (at a school where about 40% of the students went either to Ivy League-and-equivalent universities or top-5 LACs), but apart from that she was seen as an elite student. She was one of only three kids who had a particularly challenging overloaded curriculum in 9th and 10th grades; the other two both wound up turning down Harvard to go to Stanford. She moved to much larger urban public magnet where ranking was super-important, there was a lot of grade inflation, and scads of AP courses were offered starting in 10th grade. The new school sent as many kids to top universities as the old one, but of course they represented a much smaller percentage of the class.
The new school insisted on ranking her, and would not assign any extra weight to the accelerated or extra-challenging courses she had taken, because they weren’t AP classes or “Honors” classes. So it stuck her in the middle of the second quintile. “Don’t worry,” the principal told me, “She’ll probably be in the top 10% when she graduates.” I said, “I don’t care where she is when she graduates; I care where she is when she applies to college.” At that point, she was ranked about 120. (Her final ranking was 43.)
The admissions people at the colleges to which she applied assured her they were familiar with both schools, and they could read and understand her transcripts from both schools independently. Nonetheless, I am pretty sure that her relatively low ranking at the new school hurt her at the most selective colleges to which she applied. It didn’t matter in the long run, though; she was fine.
@JHS
Who told adcoms about her situation?
@“yalie 2011”
What is to tell? When the transcripts are sent from the HS…it is very clear when a student transfers…because some of the courses are from a different school.
Do adcoms pay that much attention to these details?
Some colleges actually recompute the GPA using the college criteria to do so.
And yes…the adcom do look at the transcripts. At least the ones I know do!
Class rank varies so much by school. And high some schools don’t rank…at all. Or they rank only the top decile, or top 20 students or something like that.
And what does it matter anyway? It’s not like the family is going to up and move back to the old school…right?
My daughter was very proactive in bringing it to the attention of admissions officers. Her college ambitions were those of a top student at the private school she attended for 11 years, not those of a normal mid-class student at the public school from which she was applying. Neither she nor I was very successful in getting her counselor at the public school to help her out much – he refused to check the “most challenging” box because she didn’t take AP Calculus and only took one AP lab science, and he would not consider her curriculum at the old school, or say that the school had excluded her from math and science AP courses in 11th grade. So she got a supplemental recommendation from one of her teachers at the old school that addressed her curriculum choices there.
She went about it very intelligently. And it worked, to the extent that she was accepted at several colleges that would have been extreme reaches based on her class rank. But she wasn’t accepted at the most selective colleges to which she applied. As I said, in the long run, it didn’t matter at all, she was fine.