<p>You can only self report grades/scores, will they get your actual high school transcript to see class rank at all?</p>
<p>Not until they offer you a spot, you subsequently enroll as a student, and then UCB asks for the transcript over the summer just to verify that your self-reported grades match. It would be much, much too late to matter at that point.</p>
<p>They’ll know if you got ELC…top four percent in your school?</p>
<p>^ That’s only top 4 percent. In a class of about 500, that’s 20 people or so. There is a considerable difference between 1st and 20th in class.</p>
<p>Also, some schools (like mine) don’t participate in ELC.</p>
<p>Cal does not care about your high school class rank.</p>
<p>^ of course it does because they’re mandated by law to accept students not below the top 12.5% of their HS class. That’s something Cal couldn’t afford to violate.</p>
<p>Too bad the last part is extremely dumb, since a lot of CA HS ranking systems are different, since some are unweighted and some are weighted.</p>
<p>Either way, class rank matters most for privates.</p>
<p>RML - Cal is not obligated to accept those in the top 12.5% (or even 4%) of their class, the UC system as a whole is. Cal may look at ELC as a minor factor of preference but that is about the extent of it IMO.</p>
<p>To be very honest, while I have not checked anything official on this, I believe Berkeley’s system will favor your overall numbers most, in relation to their own GPA calculation system. I also don’t think they seem to be taking difficulty of high school greatly into consideration – of course the sample size I’m talking of is a miniscule subset of the population, but it seems at least there to be pointedly the case that those with very high SAT II and SAT I and GPA tend to make it in. From that token, yes, if your class rank is higher, it probably is going to end up helping you in the end, but you don’t have to be top of your class.</p>