<p>Is a top 5% class rank considered competitive for CC top universities? as opposed to top 1%</p>
<p>Rank is not that impt. to some top schools… like GPA.
At U of Chgo. Admissions stated that rank is like a finish line of a race but
a transcript is more telling, more of your school “story”.
snapshot vs. a movie :)</p>
<p>I can’t speak for Chicago, but rank is important, even when a school doesn’t rank or calculate GPA. It is the only way for adcom to compare you with your classmates, and putting your grades in context. Your GC’s LOR asks your GC to check off if you are top 1%, 5%, 25%…Your ranking combined with your test scores will give adcom a good idea how competitive you are.</p>
<p>Top 5% is good enough for top tier schools</p>
<p>Others have claimed that the super-selective schools favor the top 2 among non-hooked applicants, with possible acceptance down to the top 2% for non-hooked applicants, and possible acceptance down to the top 10% for hooked applicants.</p>
<p>The Ivys and peer schools, if unhooked, will expect you to be at at top of your class. Top 5% is great, but your chances are definitely higher if you are in the top 1-2%.</p>
<p>It also depends on the high school. Some schools in America are so competitive and have such a strong student body that students outside the top 1-2% regularly get into the ivies and peer schools.</p>
<p>Depends on your school. If your school is ultra-competitive (i.e. a top private school), then top 5% is good because a top 5% there is equivalent to valedictorian status at many other schools. But if you go to a non-rigorous school (i.e. public high school), then you should be at the top percentile since there’s not so much cutthroat competition. It’s all subjective. That’s why the transcript puts it in focus.</p>
<p>Ptontiger16, just a comment on your statement that public high schools are “nonrigorous”. That is not necessarily the case. Some public high schools are quite rigorous, more rigorous than some private prep schools. My son attends a public high school of about 1600 students which offers many AP courses and is extremely rigorous with no “grade inflation” in the honors/AP classes. Of course, there are some public high schools which are not rigorous and give out A’s like candy. However, this is also true of private schools. Some are highly rigorous in their academics, and others are not as rigorous or are so small that they do not offer a wide variety of challenging courses. In our city there are several private schools, including one “college prep” school, but none of them match the rigor of our public high school.</p>
<p>^My apologies. I was just referring to the general trend of public high schools being less rigorous than private high schools. As you know, public high schools are underfunded (and receive less overall funds) than private high schools - at least those public high schools that aren’t in affluent suburbs - and therefore are able to spend less per student. Because of this underfunding, better teachers aren’t drawn to these inner city or rural public high schools and as a result, students don’t get as high a quality of education. What they do get (and this was what happened at my school) are watered down versions of courses and a grade distribution heavily skewed towards the A. Compare this to a private prep school or affluent suburban high school where the quality of teachers is high - one school in my state boasts that 80% of its teachers have master’s or PhD’s, for Chrissakes. In these schools, they have the funding to impose a rigorous curriculum and the teachers are willing to do so.</p>
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<p>Remember that there are a lot of private schools whose focus is something other than elite-level (for a high school) academics. Many focus on providing a specific type of environment (often religious), with rather ordinary academics (or religious academics for religious schools).</p>
<p>Getting back on topic, a top 10% ranking is usually regarded as solid, but anything above that can obviously help. I advise you look at the Common Data Set of universities to which you are applying; I know Harvard and UC Berkley don’t care at all about class rank and MIT cares little. At schools like Yale and Brown it may make a huge difference, though.</p>
<p>The reason ranking is important is because adcoms want to read a student in context with the student peers (same high school, region). A top 5% student from a less rigorous school may not be as prepared as a student from a top high school, but it would not be the student’s fault. It is why sometimes a student with below 2000 SAT scores from inner city maybe admitted and a student from a more affluent area may need 2200+ test scores (it is especially the case for AP scores). A student from inner city will not be compared with students from Exeter, and that’s why a student’s school ranking is very important. It is not to determine how prepare a student is, but to see how he/she has done relative to others under a particular circumstance.</p>
<p>Adcoms may prefer (know) certain high schools because or their rigor and number of students matriculate there every year, but for diversity they like to admit students from different regions and social economic background. My younger kid went to two different private schools, a top US private and an international school. The top private could get 2-5 admitted to many top 10 schools each other, whereas the international school consistently get 1-2 admitted to top 10s, and those 1-2 are usually Val and Sal of the school.</p>
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Where is your source for this? I am curious because most of us do not know why someone is admitted or rejected.</p>
<p>Over half of HS have dropped rank…isnt this becoming a problem then for admissions?</p>
<p>No, Common App’s teacher and counselor evaluation form asks if a student is top 1%, 5% or 25%… of the class.</p>
<p>ok well I go to an IB high school, which seem to be a rigorous curriculum? My transcript is also more rigorous in that in addition to my traditional high school, I also took online AP classes. In the end, my rank is top 5%</p>
<p>Also do high schools consider senior year midyear report in rank before submitting college apps?</p>
<p>If you are applying ED then just your first quarter, if you are applying RD then your GC will send in your first semester grades.</p>
<p>@oldfort As I said, each school issues a Common Data Set in which it reports factors considered in admissions and weighs each factor (see section C7). Both Harvard and UC Berkley say class rank is not considered in admissions. The sets are online, so feel free to search “X Common Data Set” for any school you wish. </p>
<p>You may also find <a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/provost/institutional-research/common-data-set/[/url]”>http://www.princeton.edu/provost/institutional-research/common-data-set/</a> helpful.</p>
<p>Ok, looking at Harvard’s common data set, it shows Harvard doesn’t view any category (academic rigor, GPA, test scores, essays, LORS) as important or very important when it comes to admission. They only “Considered” those categories. Common Data Set is filled out by each school, it appears to me Harvard adcom just didn’t want to answer those questions. </p>
<p>Berkeley is an UC, it is a lot more number driven and less hollistic than other privates. It would be hard for me to believe that they don’t care about ranking or GPA.</p>
<p>Many selective colleges receive Class Rank from less than 50% of applicants. They simply cannot place much emphasis on it with this low response rate.</p>
<p>Instead, the Regional Adcom will work to know each high school and understand applicants in the context of that school. Because this results in estimates, there is little difference between top 1% and top 10% for most high schools. Instead of considering “Class Rank”, they consider “Academic Performance” and “Academic Rigor”.</p>
<p>My impression is that even the title of Valedictorian has become so watered down that this designation no longer carries much weight. Some high schools award the title “Valedictorian” to anyone whose GPA is above 4.0, even if this means 20 or more students. I read on a thread where a student wasn’t in his class’s top 10%, but he did have Val on his transcript.</p>
<p>Exactly. At our HS the Val is the one who can take Honor courses for the bump in GPA and the “easy” APs…they play the game. Take some classes P/F ( standard classes) so that an A doesnt bring down their GPA ( Gym, Band, Art, etc) and throw in only 7 graded periods or 6 even…with a study hall…rather than 8 rigorous periods like some students and you have your Val. It’s a joke at our HS.
And we are doing away with rank starting with middle school kids. Will be Magna cum laude and Cum Laude, much more meaningful.</p>
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<p>Berkeley cares a lot about GPA, not about rank, according to its common data set, section C7.</p>