What do colleges do when your school doesn't rank

<p>Around 20% of our school has above a 4.0 W (and so do I), and that's the most granular info they give out, but I have no idea if I'm in the magic top 10% (quite possibly not). How do admissions offices consider this?</p>

<p>they’ll rely on your SAT/ACT more as well as truly see if your schedule is rigorous or not. Your scenario is pretty common these days.</p>

<p>Non-ranking can be an issue ~ D has applied to at least two schools that use ranking as part of their scholarship requirements. Because one of these schools offers full tuition for certain stats (including rank) I called their admissions to find out if she would qualify. I was told the gc needed to make an unofficial phone call to their office and give a rank…so far gc isn’t on board. I’m first waiting to make sure she is accepted into the school, into the program she really wants, meets all other criteria, and its a top 3 contender and then it is my intention to meet with the Dean of Students and appeal the rank decision. I’m not too happy about the non-ranking status at a school which several sources puts at #1 in the state, #5 in the northeast, and in the top 20 in the nation. They also have no valedictorian or salutorian which some scholarships are based on as well and for which I think D might qualify.</p>

<p>Oh it’s rigorous all right – I’m fairly sure less than 5 students at my school have ever taken my schedule (lots of early math, science, language APs)</p>

<p>My school doesn’t rank eother.
I left my GPA, class rank and percentile blank on the CA.
I’m pretty sure, your counselor fills some of the infos in for you.
I was accepted to my school so I don’t think there’ll be any problems for you.</p>

<p>Colleges will generally infer a rank based on the HS profile provided.</p>

<p>My S’s school does not, and will not, issue any rankings. Period.</p>

<p>If the rigor of the curriculum and GPA are insufficient, that is just the way it goes. They don’t want kids competing against each other; they want them to learn for learning’s sake. Diffuse the competition. My S loves it.</p>

Erin’s Dad, how exactly do they do this, and how much weight is given to it, when 20% of your class is in the same interval of .3 GPA?

My local HS doesn’t rank and it has never been an issue for students getting into schools or getting scholarships. The college can get enough information from what is given to them (your transcript, GPA, school profile, standardized tests etc.)

@bowerland‌ Generally the school will provide a percentile chart to colleges if they don’t rank. For example, my school sends a chart that could generally show you what percentile your GPA is. For example, if you have a 3.8 unweighted, that would put you in the 80th percentile. From that information, plus the class size you provide on Common App, admissions officers can have a pretty good sense of where you stand.

Qwerty568, Are you referring to the class profile? I’m fairly sure we don’t send anything more detailed.

@bowerland‌ Yep! My guidance counselor says that they send a percentile chart of gpas in the class profile and from the self-reported class sizes colleges can get a pretty good sense, but not an exact number, of each kid’s rank.

@Qwerty568 That’s what I was referring to; 20% of our class is in the same range in our class profile.

How large is your class size? For fairly small schools, like mine, even though 15-20 percent of our class is in a certain range, it’s still not that difficult to discern. I think once you have graduating classes of 250+ it starts to get harder.

My question is if the school does not rank, but gives out percentiles, what does the college do if say their college board profile says 95% are in the top 25%?

@slights32 They generally have a footnote that says that the data is based on the X% of students whose HS provided rank.

I think it’s around 400-500 people.