^^^For prep schools that don’t rank, I am sure the college counselors who write the main letter “hint” or blatantly endorse where a student sits among their peers. In a lot of ways, this is unfair because college counselors being human have bias and are subjective. I’d rather have rank, at least that way the student gets a fair shot at showing what they’re made of.
Many scholarships require a certain class ranking. I would hope that GCs of non-ranking schools would be generous with ranking information for the purposes of scholarships.
So a few college admission officers have commented that less than half their applicants have a rank, there was a quote by the Penn AO that said it was 35% for them. The main reason is that class rank can be gamed, now being shrewd is not a bad skill to have but schools want to measure
Also schools know that if you remove ranking, their students have a better chance of getting in.
“Even if your school doesn’t rank, I’m sure colleges can find ways to estimate it.”
It would be a lot of effort, really a lot if the high school is not known to you. I don’t think they do it, notice the percentage of NR students in the class profiles.
My D’s school does not rank. So they only give a range in the GC recommendation. However, there was an award for the top 5 students of each school in each division of my state. So they must have a rank for the students although they may not have it for everyone. Because of that I know my D was among the top 5 out of 400+ in the class, but it was only shown as top 10% in her college application.
There’s some schools like Andover which don’t rank, but do provide a histogram. From that, I’m sure they can estimate a pdf and where you fall on it.