@BigDawgzTV : I feel like the Asian thing really only applies to other schools. Emory cares more about course rigor and grades than scores (they even report to Collegeboard that it is in the second bracket of importance in admissions) which results in blurring of lines when it comes to who needs to get what (a surprising amount of Asians are apparently admitted near or within the upper regions bottom quartile and I am talking Korean and Chinese Americans). I don’t even think most of the top quartile at Emory is occupied by Asians. It may be evenly split or mostly occupied by whites.
And yes upward trends look good because they indicate improvement and resilience more so than perfection. Students who were perfect all 4 years are more likely to resist or respond negatively to lower college grades or a challenging college curriculum (because they just desperately want to repeat the HS perfection that they cannot tolerate fighting for a strong grade. Also, perfection, depending upon how it was achieved, results in inflated sense of ability and ego. So if the student is challenged in college, they will blame the instructors essentially saying that they are too smart to “feel a burn” in certain classes and that a course is “unnecessarily” difficult because they did well in that area in HS. There are a surprising amount of students like this, especially valedictorians and salutatorians, who ,may have to eat some humble pie). And this is another reason Emory puts so much emphasis on course rigor (this one is actually quoted as the main consideration in admissions on collegeboard and to some extent the admissions website). A