<p>I'm ranked 15/500+ students with a 4.0 uw gpa and 4.65 weighted. Will Stanford compare my course load with students with better ranks? I took extremely difficult classes junior year (ap chem, ap physics, ap comp sci, ap language, college calculus).</p>
<p>Are you worried? Your class rank is great, top 5%. And your courseload is full of advanced courses. Stop worrying, you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>That is how they organize the applications, though. The valedictorians and salutatorians get the senior admissions officers, then the rest of the top 10ers get the mid-level officers, and everyone else is pretty much in the slush pile with the newbies.</p>
<p>Is that really how they do it? Maybe I’ll be able to “wow” the newbies haha.</p>
<p>Don’t get your hopes up. The newbies are all freshfaced graduates who’ve been turned into cynical gargoyles by the beginning of grad school, aka the deconstruction of everything you deconstructed in college. So, they’re bound to reject every application they get, rationalizing it by telling themselves that they’re “saving you” from the hell they went through in their four years at Stanford. Plus, they already know your application’s in the slush pile. All of this contributes to a severe confirmation bias, because of which they zero in on every single minute problem with your application (which, if you’re looking for them, aren’t hard to find), including that rank of yours, thus providing further evidence for your eventual waitlist/rejection.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>^ I’m pretty sure he is joking. </p>
<p>That said, no, being number 15/500 makes you well within the top 5 percent of your class. this will only not harm you, but maybe even be slightly helpful. That said it is kinda a crapshoot. But I would not worry about your rank ruining or even hurting your application. </p>
<p>Good Luck!!</p>
<p>^I never joke about college admissions. Especially not to Stanford.</p>
<p>Your stats look fine, so don’t worry about it. I know you won’t realize it until aroud May of next year, but there really isn’t any use in killing yourself with nervousness and the like.</p>
<p>Haha, ok.
Well, unless you personally work in admissions at Stanford, I don’t think you (or anyone else) can really know. But Stanford surely takes kids who are not in the top 10, the school is too big not.</p>
<p>Generic, though Stanford does take some students who aren’t in the top 10% of their classes, it’s not because the school is too big not to. Stanford gets more than 34,000 applications per year and only admits about 7% of that number, so if it wanted to, it could easily admit only students who were in the top 10% of their class, given the very competitive quality of the applicant pool. But Stanford elects to admit some students each year who have other qualities that meet the college’s institutional objectives (such as a highly diverse student body, having incredible musicians and athletes in the student body, reaching out to first-generation college students, etc. etc.). Even in those cases, these students have to be able to convince admissions that they can succeed academically at Stanford.</p>
<p>If it makes any difference, I was in the top 20% of my class of 300. We didn’t rank but I doubt I was in the top 10, and people with much better grades than I didn’t get in. So I think as long as you show yourself to be both intelligent and Interesting, you have a deceit shot.</p>
<p>I meant top 10 in his class, in terms of students, not percent. He was well within the top 10%, which I think means that his rank won’t hurt him. Of course, Stanford takes most of their students form the top ten percent, but( far) less must come form literally the top 10 at their schools. I may be wrong, of course.</p>