<p>I've been wondering lately how important class rank is once you break into the top 10%. Currently I'm pretty much in the top 6% at my school, but I don't think I'll be able to break into the 5% range by the time I send college apps (I'm currently a junior).</p>
<p>So I'm wondering how much of a factor in admissions class rank within the top 10% is. Obviously a valedictorian has a much better chance getting in somewhere like Harvard than somebody ranked 104/1045, but when does it all start looking the same?</p>
<p>Take the ivies for instance, I'm ranked 82/1311 - top 6%, but is that more hurtful than helpful with admisions? (assuming the schools we're talking about are competitive)</p>
<p>If there are other threads about this that I missed, feel free to post links to them if they answer my questions.</p>
<p>Pretty important. Being the valedictorian or salutatorian gives you a good boost not just because your GPA is probably very high, but also because top colleges don’t like rejecting valedictorians as much as any other student in the top 10% because it may probably send the message to the high school “well if the valedictorian got rejected, then how could anyone get in” and thus decrease the number of applicants.</p>
<p>They care a lot that you’re in the top 10% because that directly affects their US News ranking, and they all care about that, even if they don’t admit it publicly. That’s why hardly anyone ranked outside the top 10% of their HS class gets in (and you can pretty well assume that the 2% who do are “hooked”). That’s also why many fancy private high schools, and quite a few high-end public ones, have stopped ranking; they figure ranking just puts a cap on the number of their graduates who are going to be admitted to highly selective colleges.</p>
<p>The Brown data clearly tell us that it helps to be val; vals have an admit rate nearly double that of top 10%-ers. But it only helps so much; Brown still rejects 4 out of every 5 vals who apply. And it helps to be sal, but not as much as val; 86% of sals are rejected. After that, as long as you’re in the top 10%, exact position probably doesn’t matter so much, though in general the higher the better. Just know that you’re competing against a lot of vals and sals, the vast majority of whom are rejected. But whether you’re top 5% or top 6% isn’t going to make all that much difference; it’s doubtful that would be what makes or breaks your candidacy.</p>
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<p>Could possibly be true at Brown, but I doubt it. At first blush it looks like there just aren’t that many vals and sals enrolled in Brown’s Class of 2015 (212 vals/sals out of a class of 1,719, or about 12%). But most of those who apply, are admitted, and enroll don’t have a HS class rank. Only 745 enrolled members of the class have a HS class rank; of those, 212 or 28% are vals or sals. Now if you assume 40% of the 745 with a HS class rank are “hooked” (recruited athletes, legacies, URMs), that leaves just 447 unhooked members of the class who have a HS class rank. There are 158 vals and 54 sals in the class, for a total of 212 (vals + sals). That comes to 47% (just about half) of the 447 unhooked members of the class with a class rank. But surely some of the vals or sals are hooked; you can’t assume that 100% of the vals and sals are unhooked. So the percentage of vals and sals among the unhooked class members who have a HS class rank is going to somewhere south of 47%, possibly quite a bit south. </p>
<p>And then, what do you do with the 57% of the class who don’t have a class rank? If you keep them in the denominator, we’re right back to 12% of Brown’s class being vals or sals. But maybe that’s not the fair way to count. Presumably some of those who don’t have a HS class rank but are admitted and enroll at Brown would have been #1 or #2 in their class if anyone was keeping score . . . but half? I don’t think so. There’s no way to tell for certain, of course, but the reason I don’t think so is that I suspect many of those admitted and enrolled without a class rank are coming from fancy private prep schools or high-end suburban schools that don’t rank because their students are generally strong and they want more than the top 10% to be able to get into highly selective schools like Brown. Not that they all do, of course, but from the strongest high schools far more than the top 4 students (half of whom would have been val or sal) are getting into Brown or schools of comparable selectivity. That’s the whole point of not ranking.</p>
<p>So I’m going to write this claim off as urban myth, at least for Brown.</p>
<p>Class Rank is a very important factor for elite college admissions. What a specific percentile indicates can vary a lot when comparing certain schools. For example, being in the top 1-2% at the majority of public high schools could be less impressive than being in the top 5% or even top 10% of a competitive magnet school, so context is important. Assuming your high school is ok but not the best, Top 10% is not going to help if you’re targeting the most selective schools (ivies and others). Given the size of your school (and I don’t know the quality of your school) but you’d probably need to be in the top 1% (basically top 10 of your class) to meet the academic standards of such schools. Less selective school, obviously your rank may not hurt your chances as much.</p>
<p>The school I attend is a suburban public high school and is pretty competitive, (about 45-50 national merit semi-finalists) however, I’d say the school district is much more renowned than the high school itself is. (I guess the best way I can put it is that the top quarter or so of students are of a high academic caliber, but beyond that it begins to trail pretty significantly)</p>
<p>So assuming the consensus is that the top 1 maybe 2% is what very elite schools (HYPSM, Columbia, Cal Tech, etc) look for in the majority of applicants (of course depending on their high school), then at what level of university does the top 10% become the main barrier you need to break to be considered? Harvard v. Vanderbilt/Georgetown v. NYU for instance?</p>
<p>The higher the rank the better, no question. I’ve been watching admissions results from our local highly rated public HS for several years, and the results are consistent. Out of each year’s class of about 300, about 3 to 5 kids are accepted to top 10 schools, not counting athletes and legacies.</p>
<p>Those 3 to 5 kids are typically in the top 1-3%; the kids below that are generally rejected from the most competitive schools.</p>
<p>This year was probably the school’s best ever; in the early round the top 4 ranked kids were accepted by MIT, Caltech, Yale, and Duke. Plenty of kids below that applied early to similar caliber schools and none were accepted.</p>
<p>One of the biggest pieces of misinformation I see posted on CC is “You’re in the top 10%; you’ll be fine.”</p>
<p>In my school this year so far, only 5 students were accepted to a school in the ivies, Stanford, MIT, Caltech and the top 3-4 LACs, the valedictorian (harvard) the salutatorian (williams ED) and a number 9 and 7 ranked student, to columbia and Harvard although both of them are black. I can be considered an anomaly because I got into Cornell CoE ED, no hooks, and I am ranked 20/202, just in the top 10%</p>
<p>What I’ve seen is the top 1-2% is what matters to top schools. For the UCs, the top 5-10% would still be ok. I agree that the top 10% is not accurate for our high schools in our district.</p>
<p>I think it depends on the kind of school. In exclusive college prep private school, a top 10% is almost the same as a top 1% in a large public school. So if you are in one of those so-called ivy-feeder private prep schools and make the top 10%, you have more of a chance to get into one of the HYPMS…If you are in a large public, typically I have seen only the top 1% (if at all) will get in…the public school in our district has typically sent maybe 1-2 kid to hypms and usually they are either the valedectorian or salutarian. But private prep schools sent much more.</p>
<p>If UC means University of California, they officially don’t use current class rank when evaluating individual applicants. However, the minimum GPA and test score qualifications for the UC system are set to approximate the top 9% of the high school graduating seniors statewide and top 9% within each high school (with the master plan target of taking approximately the top 12.5% of high school graduating seniors).</p>
<p>Post #15, I know the UCs don’t use class rank but using the comparable GPA to the class profile. The percentage is my rough calculations from naviance data where I see our high school students were accepted. I don’t think I was including UC Merced.</p>
<p>Can rigor make up for a lower class rank? For example, if a student was in the 5%-10% range but had a very rigorous schedule how prohibitive would the class rank be for top 20 schools?</p>
<p>Edit: And by “very vigorous” I mean like more vigorous than the other high ranking students, such as college classes above AP level, ect.</p>