<p>I know that MIT considers rank for it's admissions. Yet at some schools, like my school, rankings are based upon non-weighted GPA. This creates a system where many of the valedictorians are people who have 4.0's but have not taken half as many challenging classes as the people who end up with a nonweighted GPA of say 3.8/3.9. </p>
<p>Will MIT take this into consideration? Since this makes it very hard to get a good rank as you are competing with 5APs on your plate with many people who are getting an easy 4.0 with maybe zero or 2APs. </p>
<p>I'd really appreciate if anyone could give feedback on how they consider rank, since from my perspective, I find it kind of difficult to understand if they would take a Valedictorian over somebody who's taken way harder classes but has gotten say two B's over the course of their 4 years. Do they recalculate the ranks in any manner to adjust the weighting?</p>
<ol>
<li>What is your current rank right now?</li>
<li><p>MIT looks at what you took holistically. They will lvoe it if you took 5 AP’s while the valedictorians did like 3 AP’s</p></li>
<li><p>Did you get all A’s in your hard classes?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>That’s a good question. My son is in exactly the same situation. No weighting, great GPA, but “only” in the top 10% (rather than the top 5%, or among the top few students) because he got a B+ as a freshman in a non-academic course, and there are enough students with straight 4.0s with less rigorous course loads that he could never “catch up.” </p>
<p>I have no idea if this is something the counselor will bring to light in the report to MIT, but I suspect not. In our fairly ordinary urban/suburban public school the counselors are spending by far most of their time trying to help the vast majority of the kids, most of whom are simply trying to get into one of the local state college branches. (Not knocking them – I went to one.) Kids interested in schools like MIT are pretty exotic here, and the few counselors, each responsible for many scores of students, aren’t likely to have much time or inclination to address or even appreciate this subtle issue. Now that all said, that’s probably the way it should be. Those other kids need the help more than my son does, as he has involved, educated parents. And honestly, I suspect that MIT will look at the transcript, look at the class rank, and figure out pretty quickly what the deal is. </p>
<p>There are SO MANY DIFFERENT kinds of schools out there using a near-infinite variety of ranks, non-ranks, GPA calculations, weird weighting schemes, etc. The most complex come from Florida, where some schools report a student’s rank amongst all of the seniors in the entire county. We’ll see a class rank that looks like “52/14,566” and a GPA of 12.432 on a 6-point scale. Gah! Florida!</p>
<p>Most guidance counselors send us school profiles, which usually contain descriptions of their particular ranking/weighting systems. If there are any weird things about the ranking system, we’ll find it. However, I’d recommend that you mention it in the little box we provide for you to describe anything like this.</p>
<p>If there’s a lesson here, it’s two-fold:</p>
<p>-That a more granular view of students’ transcripts is more usable than a single, obfuscating number, aka GPA
-That if we have any questions, or if we’ve never seen an applicant from your school before, we’ll put on our Investigation Hat and learn more about your particular situation</p>
<p>Many schools are getting rid of ranks. I get a number of emails and calls from principals and guidance counselors asking/telling us about their decision to end ranking. Prior to the proliferation of the numerous course styles/offerings, class rank had a “universal” aspect to it: #1 was always #1, and #545 was always #545. But now, some schools have any number of AP, honors, college prep, regular, IB, fundamental, high honors, etc. courses, and they’re so heterogenous, rankings might not make as much sense.</p>
<p>My school ranks by percentile (top 1% etc…). When my counselor filled out the part where it asked my rank, he put 1 out of 659 since the highest GPA of the class matched by GPA and 0 students shared the same rank. Should he have put 1% instead of #1 thought it was evident that i was valedictorian?</p>
<p>Our school does not do rankings, so I think my counselor fills it out by every 10% (decile-or whatever was required when ranking was not avaliable). From this decile system, a person with a 4.0 UW GPA might be grouped with a person with a ~3.8 UW GPA in the same 1st decile, and this is extremely misleading (especially if the 4.0 UW GPA person had a harder class schedule). </p>
<p>So I’m sure MIT looks more into this situation than just taking the straight decile placement or even rank because rank can be skewed by the difficulty of classes.</p>
<p>I wonder if MIT goes back and recalculates everyone’s GPA using the same scale, after viewing each person’s transcript. I thought that this would take forever with so many students, but I remember reading others saying that some colleges do this.</p>
<p>My school doesn’t rank. But the counselor can access percentiles (top 5%) if needed. My school only has 300 kids total though, with a senior class of 75ish so coincidentally top 5 % is actually less than 5 kids. While at much bigger schools I know top 5 % can be 25 kids or so.</p>
But people are also disincentivized to take other classes.</p>
<p>This was the system at my school, and the top 10 ended up being people who took only honors classes (in some cases, they weren’t even taking AP), then sat in study hall the rest of the day. People who were busy all day, and involved in band/choir/theater, or other classes that didn’t have honors options, took a GPA/rank hit for it.</p>
<p>Yeah, my high school dropped class rank during my freshman year.</p>
<p>Previously, it had been based on unweighted grades, since we didn’t weight at all. People said, maybe we should just weight grades instead of getting rid of class rank. But that posed its own set of problems. We were a school comprised of five magnet programs - a general academic one, math/science/technology, communications & media, performing arts, and visual arts. And we had dual-credit classes with two different colleges, and an option that allowed juniors and seniors to take certain classes at the nearby state school for free. Nobody could figure out a fair weighting scheme. If you just weighted, say, AP classes, the kids in college and dual-credit classes would be upset that their college-level classes weren’t weighted, and the math/science/technology kids who took specialized advanced science electives would be upset that those weren’t weighted. If you weighted all academic college-level classes, the performing arts kids would be upset that their (very advanced and intense) top-level performing arts classes weren’t weighted, and the top visual arts students would be upset that their post-AP studio art classes weren’t weighted. And the communications kids would have complained that with their huge number of requirements and lack of room for electives, they would be at a disadvantage since they couldn’t schedule in the AP and college classes that others had room for. And all of these people would have had reason to be upset in these cases. And even if you could have found a weighting scheme that weighted all the “right” classes, you still would have had to figure out <em>how much</em> to weight each type.</p>
<p>So yeah, I think my high school made the right call to get rid of class rank altogether. The status quo was obviously unfair and any less drastic reform would have been a mess of epic proportions.</p>
<p>Yes you are 100% right. I remember never wanting to take any electives because they were not weighted and taking a bunch of college courses to bump up my weighted GPA.</p>
<p>But look at the other extreme? Valedictorian wouldn’t mean much if AP classes were weighted same as regular classes, yes? People would be scared to take higher level courses because of getting a lower grade.</p>
<p>As for the honors part, out school doesn’t have honors except in 9th-10th grade English. There are NO Honors Sciences (only AP/IB), no Honors Math past pre-calculus, NO honors social sciences (history, economics, etc.). You get the picture</p>
<p>No body can cheat by taking just honors courses, because after taking a non-weighted intro course, you either go AP/IB or you don’t do it.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the responses everyone! Evidently I am not the only person who has strong opinions on this matter. That being said, do you guys think that MIT would look better upon someone who has 4-5AP classes, plus an elective, compared to a student with the same AP classes, same grades, yet no elective and thus a higher GPA? This whole system of being punished in a sense for taking electives in addition to difficult core coursework has been puzzling me for the past two years. </p>
<p>It would be great if someone who is very familiar with MIT admissions could answer this, since when I asked my counselor she said something along the lines of “Well they will just look at the higher GPA, so electives can only hurt you.” The concept of electives lowering your GPA has been a sort of ambiguity at our school as there are students who are only taking 4 classes that are core AP, when others like myself are taking seven (5AP plus engineering/architecture), and are thus suffering lower ranking. </p>
<p>I would really appreciate if someone could clarify on this issue, as I don’t understand what the reasoning would be for awarding students who take less (where is the meritocracy?)</p>
<p>neongreen-- mcgmit IS an MIT rep, and is already answering your question. Don’t worry about your HS and their ridiculous ranking–at this point, it’s their problem, and MIT is telling you that you don’t have to sweat it–they’re used to a lot of different varieties with rankings. Relax, and be glad you don’t live in Florida!</p>
<p>I really appreciate all the responses, and yes I did realize that mcgmit is an MIT rep. I simply posed a new question pertaining to the same topic in my second post…but when I think about it, they both have a fairly similar basis so yes, there is no reason to stress. At least I don’t live in Florida! :)</p>