<p>With Newsweek having recently released their rankings of the top public schools in America (Newsweek</a> - National News, World News, Health, Technology, Entertainment and more... | Newsweek.com%5DNewsweek">http://www.newsweek.com/id/39380)), I have begun to wonder how important such rankings are on college admission. My school has for the second straight year been ranked in the top ten and also picked up a top ten ranking from US News and World Report last year. How aware are adcoms of these rankings? Do such rankings help create a hook? </p>
<p>I have a upward trend GPA that saw me with a 3.66 freshman year and a 4.5 now, for an overall weighted that is somewhere near 3.8. Going to such an apparently competitive school, will some leeway on this less than perfect GPA be given from the most elite schools? Any feedback is appreciated.</p>
<p>Usually, colleges will take into account your counselor's school report on the difficulty of your classes, etc. For instance, AP Chemistry might be the class from hell at your school, and if you got a C in it and the college knows it's difficult, then they will overlook or sympathize. However, unless you go to Phillips or some well-known prep school, the college will usually not take your school into account.</p>
<p>The rankings are based on a simple calculation:</p>
<p>Number of AP exams taken this year by any student enrolled in the high school</p>
<p>divided by</p>
<p>Number of seniors in the graduating class</p>
<p>There are so many things that are really truly important for your HS experience, and that are real true measures of quality of education and school environment that aren't included in this calculation that the editors of Newsweek should have died of shame about publishing this list years ago, but they haven't because it sells magazines. So, basically, the results are meaningless for anyone except the people selling magazines for Newsweek and the real estate agents selling houses in those school districts.</p>
<p>Your counselor will send a school profile describing your HS to the colleges along with your transcripts. If the college has never had an applicant from your HS, the admissions officers will look at the profile, and your transcript, and figure out what your grades meant. If the college has a bazillion applicants from your HS every year, they won't need to look at the profile to interpret your transcript.</p>
<p>Take the classes that you are interested in. Do well in them. Engage yourself outside of class time in activities that are interesting to you. Stop sweating this kind of stuff.</p>
<p>I noticed that a certain nonselective large inner city high school made the top 100; from my personal knowledge of this school, I feel very sorry for all the kids there and have no idea how it ended up on the list other than maybe so many kids drop out that anyone who ends up graduating has taken an AP exam. Or the reliability of the data needs to be questioned.</p>
<p>Interesting. Out of the list of 1300, only 23 schools were from PA (and ours is not on it). I have wondered if kids have difficulty getting into some colleges partially because no one from our school has ever been accepted there! I know they are reworking the high school profile and trying to establish more connections, and they are pushing AP tests like never before.</p>
<p>OMG...my kids' high school has always been around the top 100-sometimes 90 something, sometimes 110 or so. This year we've leapt to #33. Just as I was going to start my campaign to get the school to de-emphasize AP classes! My son signed up for 4 AP classes this year-he was pushed into adding a 5th-he should have taken three! He will have taken 11 by the time he graduates. I have two younger daughters and I think they will take more like 6 or 7.</p>
<p>I think we'd be better off if Newsweek stopped publishing their list. In several areas, there's not an non-AP option to take...that's one way to get a lot of kids to take AP tests!</p>
<p>I guess I can cancel the OMG. When I looked at the story, we were 33 on a list that is there....we're in the 90's on the real list. Don't quite understand it. I thought the article said they didn't include magnet schools because they had higher SAT, etc. but on the big list there are magnets. Don't get it.</p>
<p>I agree completely. The whole thing has gotten completely out of hand in schools that serve middle class families. I'm lucky that DD is absolutely un-pushable and will have nothing to do with AP classes other than studio art (no exam, just a portfolio). Not to mention that DD's present career goals fall into a category not represented by AP type coursework, and only peripherally covered in her HS curriculum. She won't be doing anything to raise her school's profile in these bogus rankings!</p>
<p>Schools that let absolutely anyone take an AP class are more likely to make the list so list-hungry schools probably do shove everyone into the AP classes which isn't always the best option for the kid. And I think most schools make the kids pay for the AP exam fee so schools in poorer districts would be left out. Scarsdale, NY stopped AP classes and replaced them with their own curriculum but very few people would question the excellence of Scarsdale schools.</p>