<p>jaf1991 and allemanau</p>
<p>In many ways official High School class rank is meaningless. Because of the variations in the ways rank is calculated between schools, and the variations in quality between schools, colleges will use the school, course, and student descriptions provided by the GC in his letter of recommendation to compute their own weighting. The weighted GPAs produced by many High Schools are a closer approximation than the unweighted GPAs to what colleges typically do, but the details of the weighting, which courses are used in the weighting, and how the weighting is evaluated given the perceived quality of the school, vary enough between colleges that there is no perfect way to capture how your grades will be evaluated. Just recognize that unweighted class ranks underestimate how much the student will be valued by most colleges, and in selecting schools to apply to don’t be too discouraged by statistics such as 80% of the admitted students were in the top 10% of their class. In ability both are well in the top 5% of all high school students. But also recognize that there are some majors, such as engineering, that have higher requirements than the school as a whole, and a student wanting admission to the college of engineering at a university may need to meet a higher standard for admission.</p>