Yeah, that’s my complaint. I’m a mainly A student with a few B’s, and i’m barely in the top 25%. I think it’s kinda silly when schools say you HAVE to have this class rank or you’re completely ineligible for a scholarship, with no exceptions.
I guess so. My family lives in Texas and they have autoadmit with 10%. My nieces who attended UT say they can’t believe how unprepared some students are compared to others and poor fellows don’t even know as they were getting straight A’s and making top ranks in their schools, their bubbles burst when they come to colleges.
@SugarlessCandy Same! I’m from Austin and the amount of people at my school who are rejected from UT with all A’s and high scores is ridiculous.
Yep, this was exactly what I did. I transferred to a different school just 15 minutes away from my old one and my class rank shot up 40% without me changing myself that much (allowing me to get auto admit).
One small/med (800 student) private HS that some of my friends’ kids go to explained its decision to eliminate class ranking as follows:
"Class rank; a mathematical summary of a student’s academic record compared to their classmates, was
once a major component in the college admission process (The College Board). However, times have
changed. According to a recent report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling
(NACAC), more than half of all high schools no longer report student rankings. High schools across the
country have moved to eliminating rank because it unfairly penalizes some students and is a poor measure
of student achievement. In small private schools, students may be separated in class rank by a few hundredths of a point. The gap between a student ranked second and one ranked 14th can be miniscule (The New York Times).
Although it isn’t a very good measure of student success it is highly desired by colleges and universities because of
their use of a formula that produces the yearly college rankings. The popular US News and World Report
(USNWR) uses “student selectivity” as one of the factors that determines how well a college/university is
ranked (US News). In fact, this indicator is given 12.5% of the college/university’s total score. Specifically,
colleges/universities are awarded points for the number of students that they admit in the top 10% and top
25% of their high school class. Therefore, every time a college/university accepts a student below the 10%
or 25% cut off they risk lowering their overall rank on the USNWR. When a high school does not report rank a student can then be excluded from the USNWR evaluation, therefore, making them a less “risky” candidate and improving their chance of being admitted.
As a result, many colleges and universities across the country are stating that fewer students are reporting a high school rank each year. For example, at Vanderbilt, 57 percent of those who applied for admission this
year did not have a class rank. Last year, 51 percent of the applicants at Swarthmore and at the University
of Massachusetts had no class rank, as did 42 percent of applicants to the University of Oregon. (The New
York Times)."
Agreed class rank is a crappy measurement - Two examples 1: My husband’s co-worker sent his son to a test-in highly competitive all boys prep school in Texas. Even though he was an A&M legacy and in the top 20% of his class, he did not get in. If he had gone to a public Texas high school in a good school district instead of this prep school, he would have easily been in the top 7%. He ended up at Auburn and is now a chemical engineer. They did not make this mistake with D2 and sent her to the public high school and she is at A&M now. 2: I moved the summer before my senior year from one of the largest and most competitive high schools in my state to a small rural school (this was a family move & not strategic). At my large HS I was maybe top 25%, but at this rural school I was #2 in the class because I had honors and AP courses they that did not have available to take. I will tell you my senior year was a complete joke to me. They didn’t offer calculus and my English class learned how to write “research papers” for the first time. I almost died! I had been writing research papers with proper citations since 9th grade or maybe even earlier. Fast forward to college #1 struggled so much at his engineering school and I sailed through college and graduated with highest honors. So class rank is not a good measure of a student, but unfortunately until colleges stop using it this is what we are stuck with. So I guess rest in the assurance that even though your class rank may not be high your preparation will pay off at whatever college you are accepted at.
As far as gaming the system with dual enrollment, etc… , we were all over that. D17 goes to a large competitive public in Southern California. She took every dual enrollment community college class she could get her hands on to get herself into the top decile in class rank. Dual enrollment counts as AP weighting, so students who utilize those classes and get A’s can move up considerably, but they’re all doing it. If we’d moved her to a school 2 miles away she’d probably have landed in the top 5%.
my son graduated in 2015. there was a girl with a 2400/36 4.0 UW (who’s at MIT now) but she wasn’t ranked #1 or #2 or #3 in the class because the other kids ahead of her had taken summer classes for credit accrual. It was after that year and that situation that the school district changed the ranking policy; the school doesn’t rank.
we laughed every august when we saw our son’s ranking drop 20 points or so over summer because he didnt take extra classes over the summer. Once again, by eliminating the ranking, that need to play the game and add extra classes was eliminated.
from this forum, it looks like the schools in texas are pretty ruthless with rank and admittance. Ouch. It doesnt seem fair; and i guess there’s lots of games and stress going on in schools about that.
I am under the impression that selective colleges do take into account the overall quality of high schools when it comes to class rank. Top 5% at a mediocre high school or top 25% at a better one? I don’t have a definite answer.
@bgbg4us Schools in Texas are very ruthless!
I am of the opinion that Texas’s system while attempting to help people in poor districts actually does those students, the best students in Texas and the state itself a disservice. Some students get put into situations where they cannot be competitive, others who would be get denied and the state of Texas sends many of its best and brightest to other states. Too many unintended consequences.
We are in the same boat in TN. DS attends a small highly competitive public performing arts school. He has worked his butt off moving from 27 in 9th grade to 9th heading into 12th. Sadly, his class is less than 70 students so top 10% is 6.5 kids. The other thing is that a kid can have higher scores in non academic classes pitted against academic classes. He got 3 Bs in 9th grade, that have been a thorn in his side since.
So I am trying to get his school to change their process, but I’ve been told that it would have to go all the way to the district. The school has said they can write a letter to colleges explaining the competitiveness of the school, but I think that would be a waste of time.
Anyone successful in convincing a school to drop class rank? I will share some info from here, but it definitely seems that, like normal, private schools are doing what’s necessary to benefit their students and public schools don’t get the handicap they are saddling their kids with.
Our magnet high school stopped ranking when enough of the top kids parents told them they would transfer their kid back to their home school so they’d move from a rank of 20 to a rank of 1 or 2 at their “home” school.
My kids’ high school also doesn’t rank, except for naming a val and sal. And thank goodness it doesn’t! There’s enough pressure on these poor kids to do well, may as well make it less competitive and more collaborative a learning process.
More of the schools in the bay area are removing rank as well not only to lessen stress but also to stop the grade grubbing that was going on. Some schools only give unweighted GPAs also. The school info sheet has the ranking by a GPA range in deciles. So top 10% would by 3.9-4.0 and the college could figure out where in the top-10% an applicant belonged if they wanted to fine tune a class rank for admissions, but it’s more for US News than anything).
But if he was top 20%, he could have still gotten admitted if his SAT scores were good because he was top quarter (TAMU Academic Admit).
Class rank helps ADCOMS understand how you rate compared to your peers. Often times, elite colleges are not looking for how you compare against those outside your community, but how you compare within your community with the opportunities you were given.
They want to see how you compare to your peers. It is a valid way of comparing students academics since GPA can vary so much from school based on calculation. I know my school’s way of GPA even varied by graduation year until next year (they switched systems from a 100 point scale to a 4.0).
However, at state schools, class rank (which means auto-admit that can be pretty unfair) does suck. You have students getting into a state university with 5% class rank and a 1100 SAT while students with a 1400 SAT and poor class rank are rejected because the majority of the seats were taken up by automatic admission.
Even if your school doesn’t rank, I’m sure colleges can find ways to estimate it.