How competitive is my high school?

dufus3709
Tue, 09 Aug 2005 16:08:38 +0000

How competitive your high school may or may not be is not really much of a factor in admissions. The colleges want you to do the best wherever you are going. They want you to take the most difficult curriculum available at your high school, and they want you to rank well compared to other students at the high school. If anything, you get more credit for scoring better on the SAT coming from an average high school than you do coming from a prestigious high school.

The adcoms know about different high schools because: 1) there is a regional adcom responsible for knowing the high schools in his/her geographic area, and 2) each hs sends a self-profile to every college that you apply to along with your transcript (ask your GC/Registrar for a copy)

There are three myths concerning high school quality. The first is that you can’t get the necessary background for the extremely selective colleges unless you go to a prestigious high school. The second is that applicants from the same prestigious high school do not compete against themselves when 20-40 people apply to the same college from the same high school. The third is that a prestigious college will only take a single applicant from any single high school.