<p>For Rice you have to be in top 5% of class?!?!!?!?</p>
<p>Is there ANY way around this?</p>
<p>Not that I know of. I guess you're done for. Sorry.</p>
<p>Wait really? My life is ruined :'(</p>
<p>They're messing with you. No school throws applications out the window solely because of class rank. As long as your stats are good and you have a good application, you will be considered. If you went to school with 200 kids that got 2400s on their SATs and you got a 2390, you'd still be a major consideration for any school. Ranking doesn't mean much if anything at all.</p>
<p>You really took iambored10's comment to heart...? Anyways, just listen to capobach.</p>
<p>Here are a few of Rice's statistics:
Rice</a> University | Prospective Students
Rice</a> University | Prospective Students</p>
<p>As you can see, only a little over 50% of class of 2011 were top 5%. The percentage is skewed by unranked admits, but it does show that you do not have to be in the top 5% to get in. Also, you don't have to have perfect scores to get in.</p>
<p>you dont HAVE TO be in the top 5% but if you check out the link driscol provided you , over 84%+ were in the top 5% for the class of 2011</p>
<p>^^ You can't really jump to that conclusion, since 956 of the 2,251 admits for the Class of 2011 were unranked. That's a full 42%!</p>
<p>1,028 of the admits were indeed in the top 5% (45% of all admits). But 267 (11%) were ranked below the top 5%. Indeed there were even a few admits who ranked in the BOTTOM HALF of their high school class.</p>
<p>So no, you don't have to be in the top 5%. But it certainly does increase your chances for acceptance if you are!</p>
<p>What does it mean to be unranked? School doesn't send exact rank but sends DECILE (i.e. top 10%, top 20%) or school sends nothing at all? If that many students are unranked, then maybe they only consider the ppl w/ specific ranking (i.e. 7/450) to be "ranked" and ppl with rank like top 10% to be unranked? Just a theory</p>
<p>Each school does it differently. Some give deciles, some give quintiles or quarters. My sons' high school gives a "grade distribution table" that says X students in senior class had weighted GPA of 4.0 - 4.25, Y students had GPA of 3.5 - 4.0, Z students had GPA of 3.0 - 3.5, etc.</p>
<p>I suspect that "unranked" includes not only students attending schools that provide absolutely no ranking info but also any student with non-specific ranking like the grade distribution given above or very broad rankings (like quintiles or quarters) that don't fit neatly into Rice's categories.</p>