How much of an emphasis does Yale place on class rank?
I go to a small, very competitive school with about 120 students, and I do not believe I am within the top 10% of my class, but only 3% of those not in the top 10% were accepted.
My GPA is around 3.96 UW
Are you saying Yale lists only 3% that are not in top 10% of their class in their published results?
Do you know how many students have been accepted from your school in the last couple of years and why they were accepted?
Yes, Yale lists that 97% of accepted applicants were in the top 10% of their graduating class.
and I have no clue who has been accepted where, much less why. Will that affect my chances of admission?
You’ll just need your schools councillor to explain this to admissions at Yale. My son was/is is in the exact same position he attends a highly academically selective school where all attendees would be in the top 10% at a school with a normal distribution of students. Yale didn’t have too much problem understanding this as the school councillor had the supporting data at the ready. Good luck.
The regional AOs at Yale, and other similar schools, have a surprising awareness of the schools in their region.
Your school counselors should be aware of how many people got accepted to which school and what their profiles are to be able to tell you if Yale accepts someone like you from your school irrespective of your rank.
In reality the 3% Yale admitted outside of the top 10% most likely have hooks other than academics.
Thank you for all of the help so far!
Does your school rank by unweighted or weighted GPA?
If it’s unweighted, then your school is probably really competitive.
If it’s weighted, then that probably means that either you’re taking easier classes or that your peers are taking more weighted than you are.
If it’s the first case, then Yale will know how competitive your school is.
If it’s the second case, then you probably need a good explanation on why you haven’t been taking as rigorous a course load as your classmates.
rdeng2614 - my school ranks by both unweighted and weighted GPA, so I have 2 different ranks, which are very close together.
They use UW GPA for graduation, so the person with the highest UW is the valedictorian
I have also taken the most rigorous course load available.
As @middletrackparent stated, this is a question for your guidance counselor, as they will have school-specific information that only relates to you and your high school.
For example: my kids went to a very large public high school (Stuyvesant) which has a graduating class of about 900 students, and about 150 kids each year apply to Yale – more than your high school’s entire graduating class. And every year, Yale accepts about 10-12 students from Stuyvesant, but they cherry-pick them, some years passing over the valedictorian and salutatorian in favor of other students with lower GPA’s. And they do this based upon a student’s essay, teacher recommendations, guidance counselors’s Secondary School Report (SSR) and interview report. However, based on 20 years of data, there is a minimum GPA specific to the high school that Yale won’t go below. Unfortunately, that data is going to be useless to you or your high school because it’s too school specific. So ask your guidance counselor these questions:
Trust your guidance counselor’s data, as their information is better than anything you will get on CC.
Your final standing doesn’t matter as you’re applying before that’s calculated. You’re focusing on minutiae. Your GPA, transcript will get you noticed or not. Your LORs and personal statement will get you noticed or not. The minor data point of class rank blot out outstanding GPA/Transcript or a scintillating essay/set of LORs
Stop fixating on this rank thing. It’ll only bog you down – you can’t fix it anyway.
DD came from an elite private HS. They don’t officially rank, but if Yale compared the GPAs of the HS’s applicants, they would see that my DD was definitely not in the top 10%. Was probably not even in the top 20%. DD got accepted over other kiddos who would be ranked higher at her HS, if the HS did officially rank.
I think most “elite private” high schools officially don’t rank their students. And, for many such high schools on the East Coast, Yale probably gets enough applications from students in the top half of the class that, taking into account the school-level data the school provides as part of its secondary school report, Yale could calculate class ranks if it wanted to.
It doesn’t want to. My guess is that, if you read the fine print, when Yale says 97% of its entering class was in the top 10% of their graduating class, what Yale means is that, of students coming from high schools that provide ranks, 97% were in the top 10%. The six kids Yale took from Trinity, only one of whom would have been in the top 10% (5-6 people) had Trinity deigned to calculate rank, are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator of that calculation. Yale doesn’t mess up its great selectivity metric, but it still takes lots of kids from small, elite NYC private schools catering to the rich and unbelievably rich. Everybody wins!
FWIW: The majority of US high school’s – both public and private – no longer provide rankings to college’s, so Admissions Directors have had to come up with “creative solutions” to guess at the pecking-order at each high school. One way AO’s do this is to line-up all applications from a high school in GPA order, so they get a relative-rank of all the student’s who applied from a specific high school. That said, your rank is whatever it is, and no amount of perseverating about is going to change it. So . . .