<p>is a good class rank anyone in the top 5%? i'm in the top 2.9% of my class now but last year i was in the top 1.5%. is that still good? (ranked 15 out of 501).</p>
<p>I think top 5% is good, but as high as possible
I know i’m in the top 1% and i’m still worried</p>
<p>It all depends on the context of your high school. For a school with a weak curriculum and a low perecentage of students who go on to college, you’d want to be one of the top 1-2 students. If you go to one of the best prep schools or public magnets (ones everyone who cares about this stuff has heard of), top 15-20% could be fine.</p>
<p>It really depends on how strong your school is, or how strong it is perceived to be. At Stuyvesant in New York, or Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, or Scarsdale High, or Groton, top 5% is good class rank, and top 10% may be good class rank. At East Podunk Vo-Tech, the valedictorian probably doesn’t have much of a shot. </p>
<p>By any real-world standard, being ranked 15 out of 500 is great, and you should be proud of yourself. To get a rough sense of what it means for college admissions, though, you probably have to look at what has happened at your school in the past. Where do people ranked 10-20 get accepted? That doesn’t completely predict what will happen with you, of course, but it will give you some idea of how things tend to pan out.</p>
<p>My kids’ public magnet had classes of about 550. It regularly sends one or two students to Harvard, Yale, sometimes Stanford (hardly ever Princeton) . . . but in recent years at least no one ranked lower than 8 or 9. Kids in the top 20 or beyond would often get into Penn or Cornell, though. But each school is different. There’s a smaller public magnet here that sends slightly more kids to HYP; there the absolute rank range is a little bigger, and the percentage rank range obviously much, much bigger.</p>
<p>[Cross-posted with Admissions Addict, saying the same thing as he with less concision.]</p>
<p>ah, ok, thanks a lot for the info, guys. 
would this be something appropriate to ask my counselor? although i’m not sure the answer would really help cuz my school is only 9 years old, so only 6 classes have even graduated…</p>
<p>You’re spinning your wheels WC. What’s a good rank? One. There you have it. </p>
<p>But are others considered? Of course. You’ve read Yale’s materials. You know that they evaluate applicants on a variety of metrics and subjective areas. Your burning up brain cells over ONE sliver of your file isn’t going to serve you. Don’t bother your counselor with this triviality.</p>
<p>BTW: i was ranked about 10th or 12th in a urban HS and I made it in fine.</p>
<p>but what about an international school? My school(international) is very competitive and sends a lot of students to the top colleges in my country but no one but a handful of average students have till date applied to US unversities? How will they interpret my class rank which is one?</p>