Do they really care about rank?

College Search & Lists
1

<p>Thanks to my obliviousness to the courses that are offered to me, I missed out on an AP that many of my friends are taking (not the majority, but a nice chunk of those ahead of me in rank), and now I realize that sliding into the top 10% end of junior year is going to be ridiculously hard. I’m hoping that I’ll slip in thanks to my AP classes, and others lack of them.</p>

<p>But am I making too big a deal about this? Is that fraction/percent honestly important?</p>

2

<p><em>Hidden Bump</em></p>

<p>Oh wow. How did my topic get back to the top? :D</p>

3

<p>Ohh I had the same issue as you. Except for me, the issue wasn’t so much that I didn’t know about the class, but that the class(es) were Art History and Music Theory, the only 2 APs offered to sophomores in my year. I knew I could take them, but given that I have no interest whatsoever in either art history or music theory, I decided not to… which wrecked my rank a little. I had straight A’s and was 16/450 (at the end of junior year), not terrible, but not good either. Honestly, I worried about it more than I should’ve. I didn’t get into my top top choices, but that’s not because of my class rank, that’s because I didn’t do enough intense competitions and I’m just overall not amazing enough (my top top choices were like Stanford… Yale… MIT… I’m just a glutton for punishment?).
Basically, don’t worry too much about class rank. Obviously you want to have a rigorous course load, just to show that you can handle it and are willing to challenge yourself, but not for the sake of boosting your class rank. It’s more to your benefit to focus on extracurriculars.</p>

4

<p>Once again, how schools weight rank depends on the school. Most will look at whether you chose the most difficult classes. You can check how individual schools weight rank and class difficulty by looking at their common data set, section C.</p>

5

<p>16 of 450 is not great? Top 3.6%? Calm down.</p>

6

<p>Objective, I said rejections were NOT because of my class rank. I was just sort of OCD paranoid about that kind of thing, I thought maybe the OP might have similar tendencies?
I’m happy with 16, no worries :)</p>