<p>It is my impression that virtually all HS's that send the top 20% or more of their students to Top 20 Universities and LAC's do not officialy rank their students. As a result the reported percentage of students in the top 10% of their class for each college should be read with a grain of salt. Do the rest of you agree with me?</p>
<p>In California, virtually all high schools send the transcripts of their top students to UC for review for the "ELC" program. UC ranks them according to its criteria, whether the high schools have done so or not, to see which fall into the top 4% or 12% (for different purposes.) So UC has a pretty good idea. And at my kids' school, though there is no official rank, the GPA cutoffs for different deciles are stated in the school's profile, so a comparison of the student's GPA to that chart tells you which decile they're in. Lots of ways to figure out if a kid's in the top 10%.</p>
<p>I agree and, I guess, since Texs has a 10% program too Texas HS's may do this too or something like it. But I am focusing on the reported statistic from colleges that USNWR lists. My impression is that colleges don't include students in this statistic unless the student's HS officially calculates and reports it, even though the college may calculate a surrogate class rank to use in the adissions process. It is a subtle distinction but I think it means that the reported statistic "percentage of students in top 10% of graduating class" is not that meainingful.</p>
<p>I don't think it's any different than interpreting any other admission statistic; you have to look hard at the context to interpret any of them: SAT vs. ACT rates vary widely even among SAT-required colleges; two schools with identical accept rates can be admitting from very different pools; and HS GPA is probably the biggest wild card of all.</p>
<p>I did not quite know what to make of Caltech's report that 43% of its admitted students were unranked. I suspect it admits a fair number of homeschoolers and possibly early entrants who do are ranked by their high school at the time of application. But I wonder if that can be the explanation for such a high proportion.</p>
<p>It has been increasingly a trend for very competitive public high schools, and for privates, not to rank. This is due to the often indistinguishable or barely distinguishable statistical differences between the core 'top students.' That can also be a significant representation at a large, high-rent high school. Small privates with exceptional students often nevertheless know what the ranks are & will provide that to the colleges upon request; they just don't provide it to the students/families. Know, however, that the students tend to know precisely these rankings among themselves -- not because anyone in authority has told them, but because (again, if they're small) the students share information & it's very difficult to hide the rankings in those cases.</p>
<p>Ok, I guess it is fair to say that class rank, even if not officially calculated, still plays a major role in admissions. That being said, does anyone think that the reported % of students in the top 10% of their graduating class tells you much about the college. I am assuming that Caltech for example, excludes from this calculation all students whose HS does not officially rank, even if Caltech calculated a surrogate class rank in order to evaluate these students. If I am right a college might view a student with a surrogate class rank of 11%, from a HS that does not rank, as indistinguishable from another student with a 10% class rank at the same HS. If I am wrong and colleges feel compelled to include these students in making the calculation, then being in the top 10% as opposed to the top 11% could be a big deal since colleges care about their reported statistics.</p>
<p>My d's high school doesn't rank per se. However, in the school profile, it does say how many students are in the class, and how many fell within a particular GPA range. So out of a class of 250, if 25 got a GPA of 3.7 or higher, there's your top 10%.</p>
<p>I guess I agree, but for any number of reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>There is no uniform ranking system among high schools that do rank. Some weight, others don't, and the weighting system varies from school to school. Plus, I've never heard of a school that doesn't give equal weight to AP Stats and AP Physics C, and many would give LESS weight to a dual-registration Multivariable Calculus course. So ranking is apples-to-oranges in all cases, unless the college, re-ranks everybody. Flagship state universities may see enough of the classes for their in-state schools to do that in a meaningful way for a meaningful percentage of students, but no other schools do.</p></li>
<li><p>All high schools are not created equal. Someone ranked around the 91st percentile at my kids' school is fairly far down the food chain. Someone ranked around the 89th percentile at Thomas Jefferson, or Brearley, or St. Paul's, is going to be a strong candidate for admission anywhere. It's not very meaningful to identify them as not in the top 10% of their classes, even if that's true.</p></li>
<li><p>The bell curve at most high schools is pretty steep at the edges and flat in the middle. I am fairly certain that at my kids' school there is not necessarily much meaningful difference between a kid ranked in the 91st percentile (maybe as low as #49) and a kid ranked in the 89th percentile (maybe as high as #55). There may not even be a whole tenth of a point difference in their weighted GPAs (on a 100-point scale).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So the fact that any number of kids aren't ranked at all by their schools is only one of the reasons why that particular datum doesn't tell you much at all.</p>
<p>If anything, as used by top-20 universities the figure is probably horribly misleading if not considered intelligently. If Brown says something like 80% of its students are in the top 10% of their high school classes, that probably gives a false impression that a student outside the top 10% has some kind of shot there, when reality is that the student has some kind of shot only if he or she is in the top x% of one of a handful of extremely strong schools, or is Michael Ovitz's child, or is a URM with fabulous extra-curricular accomplishments, or is a recruited athlete. All of those people already know who they are, and don't need the statistic to tell them it's not futile to apply. Also, that 20% of Brown's class reflects probably less than 10% of its acceptances (the yield on such students is likely to be very high), and considerably less than 2% of its applications. Without some very specific other factors, a kid who is not much higher in his or her high school class than the top 10% has virtually no chance of admission.</p>
<p>Let me put it another way. IMO most highly competitive HS's don't "offically" rank becasue they don't want small differences in class rank to adversely affect thier students e.g. 11th percentile vs. 10th. The reason why most less competive HS do officially rank is that only the top 10% have a shot at admissions to highly competitive colleges so a small benefit is conferred by an "official" rank in the top 10%. This benefit comes from the ability of the colleges to include the student in the calculation as a top 10% student.</p>
<p>Many schools are no longer ranking, but as chedva mentioned, many that do not provide some sort of graph or pie chart or something that indicates gpa distribution in the graduating class (both weighted and unweighted). </p>
<p>with students trying to pad their gpa's, weighted and unweighted rankings, schools with 30+ valedictorians, and other class ranking phenomena, it is becoming increasingly more difficult for us to understand just where a student stands with respect to their peers at their high school. because we try our best to understand each student's achievements within the context of the educational opportunities available to them, not having a clear, easy to understand, and fair class ranking system can muddy the waters for us. this is why we will often call a guidance office and simply as for the info we need and why we do our homework about the high schools in our reading areas :).</p>
<p>Ad Officer,</p>
<p>Am I right that the reported statistic "percentage of students in the top 10% of their graduating class" excludes all students from HS's that don't officially rank, even if on close inspection you can tell that the student is in the top 10%?</p>
<p>I think JHS got it right that the top 10 percent cutoff can be hard to overcome for students applying to top colleges without a major hook. One of my son's classmates (large CA public) was being recruited for pole vault by the track coach at Brown and some other privates, which sent him many letters of interest and welcome, urging him to visit. He was quite flattered and pretty much assumed he was in. </p>
<p>It kind of exasperated his mother because she felt he was given a false sense of security due to his track prowess. He wasn't as diligent in his academics as he should have been and then had a disastrous junior spring at some track meets due to an injury. In a conversation with an admissions officer, the boy was told very frankly that since he was not in the top 10 percent of his class (our school ranks), he would not be a candidate for admission to Brown.</p>
<p>The sentiments in Post #10 accord with my own understanding, particularly after discussing this with competitive high schools which do not rank. And for the noncompetitive h.schools in CA, it's even a big deal (for UC) to be in top 15.5%, let alone top 4%, of any accredited high school, esp. an underperforming one. (Statewide & Local Eligibility, respectively, for U.C.)</p>
<p>With regard to post #13, this example is precisely why some of us question just how broad/overriding the so-called X factor is, when the student referred to here had not enough Q factor. I still believe that unless you have one awesome hook, Q Rules.</p>
<p>check the common data set of each college and it will state how many of the applicants provide a class rank. Williams' common data set, for example, reports 87% of matriculants in the top 10% of their class, but only 38% of matriculants provided a class rank. Thus, they don't provide/know the rank data for 62% of their matriculants.</p>
<p>According to an article in the LA Times, less than half of Calif public HS rank.</p>
<p>I don't believe, by the way, that there's anything like a top 10% cut-off. For a school like Brown, it's difficult to imagine Brown taking an applicant from my kids' public high school ranked as low as the top 10%, absent very special circumstances. All of the actual acceptances in recent memory have been of kids ranked in the top 2%. (My daughter was counseled to apply to Brown notwithstanding a lower-than-top-10% rank at the time of application, but that was because her class rank was severely affected by the way her grades had been carried over from the private school where she had gone for 9th and 10th grades. Her private school transcript and SATs were clearly competitive for Brown compared to other kids from that school, and her 11th grade results and SATs were competitive within the context of her new school. But in any event she didn't particularly like Brown, and didn't apply there.)</p>
<p>On the other hand, at her former private school I know of two recent recruited athletes accepted at Brown notwithstanding grades far outside the top 10% of the class. One of them was way towards the bottom, but with a valid, heartbreaking explanation (Duke accepted the kid, too), and the other was probably close to the median. This is a school, however, that regularly send 40% of each class to Ivies or the equivalent (including similarly selective LACs), and another 20% to the rest of the top 20 universities and top 20 LACs, whatever they are. Clearly there's no magic to being in the top 10%, 25%, or even 50% of its class at most colleges. It doesn't rank, but does provide grade distribution charts that permit colleges to estimate quartile at least pretty confidently. And a school like Brown may get 20%+ of the class applying to it, so its admissions department probably has enough data to estimate class rank fairly precisely.</p>
<p>AdOfficer, many of the SSR forms ask, for the schools which do rank (or will rank privately), "How many students share this rank"? Have you found that question to be helpful in answering the concerns you raise in your post #11?</p>
<p>Our very competitive HS does not officially rank, but I know for a fact that the GC will drop your ranking into the reference letter if it is helpful- not that that helps at UCs which don't take letters, but in most other places it does. In our HS, a top 20-30 would be top 10 at a "regular" school, so they do not rank so as to not penalise that group who is 11-30/100</p>
<p>"This is a school, however, that regularly send 40% of each class to Ivies or the equivalent (including similarly selective LACs),"</p>
<p>^^ ...which would augment the Q factor for each of their students applying to an Elite. (Known context; known standards; and also in that case -- i.e., "regularly," known admissions history & college performance of those admits)</p>
<p>Our school does the same as indicated in post #18.</p>