<p>One of my offspring was in the IB program at an old (but not especially well-known) boarding school. I’d say 50+ pages per year in English class would not have been untypical. College seminar-style discussion was part of the daily drill (along with robust athletic and community service programs.) I don’t think its graduates would have any trouble writing 5-7 page papers every other week in each of 4 classes at college. For the first day of college, freshman year, my progeny had a 200-page reading assignment and did not consider that a big deal.</p>
<p>However, based on many visits to Naviance, I did not observe what appeared to be a significant leg-up in admission to elite colleges for applicants outside the top 10% or so from my kid’s high school. Or, that is, with a GPA lower than about 3.5 (despite very little grade inflation at this school.) This is a HS that admits relatively many URMs, internationals, and children from Quaker families of varying incomes (so I would not expect there to be an unusually high concentration of legacies and “development” candidates for admission to top colleges). </p>
<p>If kids from the lower 75 or bottom 50% from Brearly or Andover are getting into top colleges in significant numbers, I am skeptical that it is because these schools are so so superior academically to other excellent but less well-known high schools. If it’s not due to a higher concentration of legacies or development admits, I’m not sure how to account for the difference (we’d have to examine some decent data for starters to be sure we know what we’re dealing with). Though I imagine it does add cachet to Middlebury’s freshman facebook if it’s peppered with names like “Stuyvesant”, “Thomas Johnson”, or “Choate”.</p>
<p>But as a general principle, in considering colleges we’ve paid relatively little attention to the class rank or GPA distributions. SAT scores are the only meaningful, objective, uniform national metric we’ve got (for whatever their flaws). For top private colleges, GPA/rank seems significant to me primarily in the breach. A low class rank is the “pre-existing condition” of college admissions (unless, perhaps, you are in the right plan.) If you’re in the top 10% it really does not tell you much because, as in other important matters (such as health care), this country stubbornly refuses to adopt national standards that allow all people to be treated in a consistent, rational manner.</p>