<p>I forgot to mention that the student class ranking of a HS is not much important. Check the percentage of high schools reporting their student ranking. Only30+% schools report it. The others don’t. Each school ranks students in their own way. The course load of this year’s val is not the same as the last year’s val. Colleges do not accept students based on ranking itself. Not because of val, sal, top5 or top10; but the course load and those grades. It is silly to focus on the class ranking.</p>
<p>The assistant dean mentioned that they put all current applicants of one HS on one table and check their standings (or Regor and grade) against each other and prior applicants of the HS. I thought this is still rather scrutinized way of re-ranking students. His answer to my comment was “Huh” and a big laugh…</p>
<p>I teach at an Ivy and the Office of Institutional Research has created a data base that tracks student’s performances versus HS. To be honest the outcomes are amazing. Some HS send us B+ students that on a consistent basis leave our institution with a GPA in the ‘A’ range. Others HS generate vals and sals that struggle to finish with a ‘B’ average.</p>
<p>No the data are not public. I suspect all colleges track this sort of data. It is used by the admission teams (1 faculty member and 1 adcom) to determine if they can admit multiple applicants from a particular HS.</p>
<p>this is contrary to everything I read and learned to so far. can you provide background data/information that leads you to believe this, OTHER THAN what the adcoms/school officials told you? By now, on this thread, it has been discussed over and over again how adcoms and school officials will do anything and everything to NOT scare candidates away so that they can keep encouraging candidates with marginal stats to apply (which is necessary to keep the acceptance rate low and their USNWR rank high).</p>
<p>Top 10% HS ranking is part of the rating agency data points, and that’s why schools want to select kids within top 10% from their HS. Many competitive highschools, as a result of this practice on the part of the universities/colleges, stopped reporting the class ranks so that their students are not penalized because of the school rank standing. In short, high schools stopped reporting ranks because of the practices by colleges/universities. It’s not that colleges/universities do not take rank serious because high schools stopped reporting them.</p>
<p>A case in point to demonstrate how seriously schools take ranking: A case of UPenn. UPenn’s SAT 75% marker (1520) is actually lower than that of Stanford (1540), Chicago (1530), Duke, Columbia (1550), etc (its peer schools). Yet, they have noticeably higher % of their students (99%) coming with top 10% high school ranking (stanford: 93%, Columbia 93%, Chicago 89%). The only way it happens is, they did deliberately favor kids with top high school ranking. The statistical odds of U Penn coming up with noticeably higher % of their incoming freshmen with top 10% HS ranking than its peers with similar academic standing and higher SAT range (however slightly it may be) just by chance are NIL. (let’s not get into the whole statistical analysis again: I have done a similar exercise with SAT spread already to debunk the popular myth that elite colleges/universities do not consider SAT all that important: the same principles apply here).</p>
<p>If your kid is still Junior or below, and s/he is the kind of kid with very high scores but not so stellar GPA, it’s worthwhile to lobby the school to change their ranking reporting practice. S1’s magnet high school did not report ranks. S2’s normal public school has changed their policy: no more rank reporting from this year on. they got wise and smart.</p>
<p>By the way, to show you how colleges/universities are taking the USNWR ranking seriously… S1 (college freshman) sent me email to tell me that the school caps the class size of all the freshman core courses at 19. The reason? the USNWR ranking uses the % of the classes with fewer than 20 students as one of the ranking criteria. This is a school which, until recently, had a reputation of not caring all that much about rankings and such.</p>
<p>Overall, I do not think it is worth worrying about test scores. In general the goal is to find students with scores in an acceptable range. At our institution, you are reviewing applications they want to see SAT scores at or above 2100-2200. If an applicant reaches that benchmark they will take a closer look. Please keep in mind the goal is to find a reason to reject the applicant. The reason! Many of the applicants have the minimum GPAs and test scores to qualify for admission.</p>
<p>Is it possible that Penn achieved this by turning up the filter on GPA rather than class rank? I ask this because looking at the Naviance from our school, with the exception of one applicant out of 150, Penn did not accept anyone with less than 3.76 GPA. I know you can have much lower GPA than 3.76 and still be in the top 10% in our school.</p>
<p>I doubt it. GPA calculation is very hard to control. Each school employs different method. For instance, some schools report only unweighted. Some schools report both weighted and unweighted. And then, the weight itself is different. Then again, some schools do “+” or “-” (like A+, B-, etc). Other schools just report 97.5/100 like numbers.</p>
<p>There is just way too much “noise” in this data. As such, the perfect correlation between the factors (GPA and class rank) is not possible. As I mentioned repeatedly throughout this thread, when one has too much noise in data and too little variance, the most plausible explanation is, the school deliberately used that variable (in this case the school % rank) as one of the selection criteria. When you are dealing with empirical data, the simplest explanation is almost always the most likely explanation. If you have to keep coming up with correlations among variables and other such things to explain away any anomaly, you are already out on the limb. Data does not like to be twisted around like a Chinese body contortionist.</p>
<p>“By the way, to show you how colleges/universities are taking the USNWR ranking seriously… S1 (college freshman) sent me email to tell me that the school caps the class size of all the freshman core courses at 19. The reason? the USNWR ranking uses the % of the classes with fewer than 20 students as one of the ranking criteria.”</p>
<p>pfffffff. Chicago has capped the core classes at around 20 for YEARS, not because of USNWR rankings[ yeah right] but because smaller class sizes make for a better learning environment, something they have known for A LONG TIME and did not need USNWR to justify it. Not everything is done for statistically provable reasons, but because experience has shown it to be the best method. CORRELATION DOES NOT = CAUSATION</p>
<p>Regarding class ranking. There is a thread here in the parents forum called 'In a perfect world, how would class rank be reported?" On post #5 someone posted a link to a report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. There is quite a bit in the report about whether class ranking is important. Here is an excerpt from page 57:</p>
<p>Very interesting report. Lots about about how colleges evaluate applicants. From what I gather: the rigor of the classes and the grades in those classes come first, then the SAT/ACT scores and finally the overall GPA. Class rank might be a ‘tipping point’ but certainly not one of the most important factors.</p>
<p>Maybe a class rank of #1 versus #20 doesn’t matter, but everything else we’ve read and discussed here suggests that a rank of top-10% versus non-top-10% matters very much to top schools, which is no doubt driven by US News, et al. For the sake of their precious rankings, a college may care very much whether a kid from a class of 200 was ranked #20 (top 10%) or #21 (not top 10%).</p>
<p>I’m developing what I hope is not an unhealthy cynicism about this process. I’m pretty sure at this point that colleges accept the kids with the highest GPAs first, then throw a few bones to whomever is left, and that they really can’t quantify or even qualitatively explain how they do it.</p>
<p>Here’s some more from the same report, page 41:</p>
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<p>I think the point with the class ranking is that you can take a kid in an academically rigorous school ranked in the 30th decile and compare them to a student in the top 10% of a non-rigorous school and have equally competitive students. Which is why private schools tend not to rank - because it can be very misleading. A lot hinges on the rigors of a particular HS.</p>
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<p>Lol - I agree! I’m also starting to wonder if spending so much time on CC is doing more harm to my psychic than good. At this point in the ‘game’ there is very little one can control except how the application is ‘presented’ and the essays. The grades are what they are, the scores are what they are, the ECs are what they are, we have zero control over the recommendations and the school profile.</p>
<p>Momlive, actually there is something very important you can control at this stage of the game… your kids application list and your kids attitude towards the non top 20 schools on that list. </p>
<p>I don’t think being cynical about the process is a productive response. Making sure that your kid has some wonderful and exciting options of schools where his or her stats put them squarely in the “we’d love to have this kid at our college” category is a lot more productive. If you get a sympathetic adcom at Amherst or Penn or Chicago who sees past some of the quirks in the application and wants to admit your kid- well that’s fantastic. But since there are hundreds of other colleges for whom those quirks are just rounding errors-- I think some of the “my kids have already gone through this process” parents are trying to encourage you newbies to get over your “top 20” or “top 40” focus and look at a broader range of schools.</p>
<p>When I say I’m becoming cynical, I don’t mean apathetic. I’m just acknowledging that the admissions decision is mostly out of our hands, and therefore not worrying about it too much. I’m much closer to that point now than I was a couple of months ago. The discussions in this thread have helped a lot. I think the Taoist approach is the right one here. “Tao” is usually translated as “way,” somewhat in the same sense as “path,” which can also mean “flow,” as in the path that flowing water takes. That path can not be predicted or controlled; if you are in the stream, you just have to go where the water takes you. In other words, go with the flow!</p>
<p>The urge for that little boat to leap out the stream and chart its own course is palpable, waiting to turn itself to “the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to recognize the impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for battle.”</p>
<p>I must admit, I do indulge too much in the why not’s and the what if’s.</p>
<p>Yup, yup, yup. S2 is ~25% at an incredibly competitive program within another HS (doesn’t rank, but we can guesstimate by GPA distributions, etc.). Going by nationally recognized goodies (AP awards, PSAT, SAT), he would have the highest scores at our local HS. We call it living in the bubble.</p>