^I disagree. If you’re one of the very few to be Commended or NM Finalist from this “less rigorous” school, then you got there on your own merit. Lots of kids crash and burn in college. But over the years, all the outliers from my kids’ school who actually got chosen despite their “non-rigorous” high school did just fine. Never heard of an Ivy or other top school admit from our school crashing and burning for academic reasons. (Even my S who famously left an Ivy for six years because of personal problems and bombed two semesters because of them eventually finished with well over a 3.0 average–Deans List for all the other semesters.)
I simply think that it’s unfair to hold a student’s school against him or her, and my observation at our plainly-not-good-enough school (we don’t put out enought NMF to make the grade, apparently), is that the colleges do not, in fact, hold it against the students who excel at such a school.