<p>Do the adcoms put more weight on class rank or academic GPA? I was just wondering because my GPA is pretty low for CC standards, (3.75) but within the context of my school it's really good (my rank is 14/570). Thanks in advance.</p>
<p>Everything in context, the rank reveals more than the GPA, but the actual grades you got reveal more than either.</p>
<p>I agree with Olo that the actual grades and courses matter more. If I were MIT (although admittedly I have no idea what they actually do), I would recalculate everyones GPA using a set of standard rules (e.g. weighting HOnors and AP over regular courses) that way they would have every applicants GPA on the same scale. Then they could look at one number, the recalculated GPA to get an idea of how well they performed academically in the course the took. Even if they did this, they would still have to look at rank becuase, for example, the difficulty of AP Calc at once school isnt necessarily the same difficulty as AP Calc at another. For stuff like this, they would probably also look at AP scores to put understand the difficultly of the course. That is, if a student is getting an A in a AP course, and then gets a 3 on the exam, they probably would take into account that the A doesnt mean as much as it would coming for a school where people with Bs get 5s on the tests.</p>
<p>Once again, I emphasize that this is what would make most sense to me, and I have no idea what MIT actually does.</p>
<p>GleaSpty:
what you proposed is not possible. each school is different. grade inflation/deflation is different for every school. a 3.5 at say, Thomas Jefferson in VA is probably far superior to any 4.0 at my school (or most schools). what you proposed can be used to compare people from the same school but is rather useless when put on a national scale.</p>
<p>well i meant to take such things into account when calculating the "standardized" GPA. for example, maybe they could weight a course at a very prestigious HS slightly more than the analogous course at a high school known for extremely easy courses. That way, the GPA would reflect the grades AND difficultly of coursework. In practice, it would be sooo difficult if not impossible to do this, so i guess my idea just plain sucks lol.</p>
<p>sorry for the critical post. ive written quite a few other ones like that (about politics, etc) today. i think im just in the mood.
im sure all of us have tried to quantify MIT admissions in hopes that it would make us feel less nervous. i decided that if it can be quantified, MIT would have already replaced admission officers with admission computers. since actual human beings fill out the applications, i think MIT is doing the right thing honoring our effort by paying human attention to the applications. the human factor is not easy, if possible at all, to predict. i came to the conclusion that college admission will never be quantified, so long as applicants remain humans and college remains an institution for humans, instead of a collection of statistical parameters.</p>
<p>tongchen,I compleatly agree...I guess the point of this was to just make myself feel better, but looking back on it, there really is no point trying to "think like MIT" because it cant be done.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the input</p>
<p>Actually, in my case, grades were far more important than rank, because my graduating class had 50 students. The top 1% of the school was less than one full person.</p>
<p>The point is, context always wins.</p>