<p>How exactly do high schools calculate their rankings, I know it goes by GPA and such but what if you transferred in?</p>
<p>Here is my situation:
Freshman/soph year I attended a fairly large public school in a rural side of Illinois. My weighted GPA was around a 4.0 and my Unweighted was a 3.8 and my ranking was 15/500ish.</p>
<p>BUt the thing is my old school did not allow me to take more than 1 honors/AP class freshman year and only 3 sophomore year but kids in my new school are allowed to take around 4-6 honors/AP as a freshman. So this brings their weighted GPA up to a possible 4.6-4.7</p>
<p>So there goes my top 5% ranking now to the top 25%. How would colleges look at this situation?</p>
<p>-the policies of the university
-how your total application presents your ranking</p>
<p>If you are applying to large, public universities, then you are probably out of luck. They tend to stick to established formulas and simply plug in the numbers provided on your transcript. However, if the college uses some form of “holistic” admissions, they will be more likely to consider the circumstances associated with the raw numbers on your transcript.</p>
<p>Talk to your GC about how your transcript will report your record and how much, if any, flexibility you have in what gets sent to colleges. Perhaps you can include a transcript from your first high school showing the higher ranking. You can also consider including a statement in your application explaining the difference in high school policies. You might even consider asking the GC from your prior high school for a LOR backing up your eplanation.</p>
<p>If you are able to include a transcript from the first hs it will be important to also include the profile, which is a paper explaining the grading scale, weighting for honors and APs, how many APs offered, **restrictions on taking APs<a href=“i.e.%20how%20many,%20what%20year,%20etc.”>/b</a>, among other information that helps admissions readers decipher what your transcript really means and how to differentiate what your school offers from another. You see how different this can be just by changing high schools, how this can effect GPAs and number of APs a student takes. The profile helps put this into context.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice blueiguana and rmldad! I really appreciate it, I just sent an email to my old high school counselor and will be scheduling a meeting with my current counselor as well.</p>