<p>How important can rank really be? I’m quite happy with mine, and it can’t hurt me, but I can’t stop thinking that rank isn’t that important based on the statistics for the Class of 2010 that are posted on the UPenn website.</p>
<li>Out of 20,483 applicants, 12,686 were unranked.</li>
<li>38% of all valedictorians that applied were accepted.</li>
<li>33% of all salutatorians that applied were accepted.</li>
<li>22% of all applicants in the top decile were accepted.</li>
<li>18% of all unranked applicants were accepted.</li>
<li>3,617 admitted out of all applicants.</li>
<li>2,283 admitted applicants were unranked, a majority of all acceptances. (Computed).</li>
</ol>
<p>Statistics 2 and 3 show that 1 or 2 rank helps quite a bit, but it still devalues thew importance of rank because there can’t be that many valedictorian or salutatorian applicants to begin with.</p>
<p>Statistics 4 and 5 show that rank isn’t really all that important because of the closeness in figures. Statistic 7 shows the same.</p>
<p>well usually people with high ranks tend to have other areas that stand out as well. So this is more of a correlation, not a causation. (man, I sound like my psych teacher)</p>
<p>Rank shows your grades in context to others and how hard you are willing to work in college. Rank is extremely important.
Just generalizing here but think about this.</p>
<h1>1/200 has lower test scores than #13/200, but who utilized their talents by looking at the class rank alone? This is the same indicator for who is more apt to utilize those same skills in college. I'm not surprised such a high number of vals were accepted, although your vals are a higher quality candidate all around.</h1>
<p>While i only have a 3.75 (or so) my rank is suprisingly high...top 5% or so....I was suprised ot learn that even though most ppl in my school take non-honors /AP's classes that they still cant even pull off a B ....lucky me ^_^</p>
<p>it might, considering the fact that it's easier to get an A in a regular course than in a AP course. however, it will make you look that much better if you still maintain top 5% rank.</p>
<p>I'm ranked #1 going in into my senior year. I don't believe, however, that there's much of a difference between #1 and #5 out of the 550 kids at my school. There sure is a lot of competition to be #1, however.</p>
<p>For the Ivies, rank is excrutiatingly important, when it is reported. Obviously, if it is not reported, schools take other factors into consideration. Most of them guess at a rank, and all of them line up grads from the same high school and rank them in order of GPA (however they decide to compute it).</p>
<p>In a 2000 study, Paul Attewell of CUNY proved pretty conclusively that, when schools rank, where you rank is absolutely crucial to your chances. The admissions probability drops precipitously from #1 to #5, for instance, even with the same SAT scores.</p>
<p>THIS is why so many high schools have stopped reporting class rank.</p>