HS class rank not based on weighted GPA

NiceUnparticularMan
Sat, 17 Feb 2024 16:20:06 +0000

So having read a lot of what AOs tend to say on this subject, here is my two cents:

Some colleges more or less have a mandate to consider rank in a relatively mechanical way. These are usually public colleges.

Other than that, when relatively selective colleges say they consider rank, mostly what they really mean is they evaluate your grades/transcript in context. They understand grading systems are very different, course offerings are very different, and so on. And so while they might be looking for relatively outstanding students, they understand what they need to look for in detail depends on the school.

And then again unless they are operating under some sort of mandate, exactly how the school itself ranks students (if at all), how the school itself weights grade (if at all), and so on is not determinative of how the college will evaluate transcripts. Again at a high level, the more selective colleges want to see people who have challenged themselves, and some specifically want to see people who have challenged themselves in all the core areas. But they also like to see kids who enthusiastically follow their interests.

And they understand that there can be tradeoffs involved, and generally they are going to be OK with different kids doing different things. But in detail, they might see some kids as being more the type of student they are looking for than others, and in fact that can explain how a kid might have more success with some colleges rather than others despite them having similar generic rankings–in detail, those colleges are not necessarily all looking for the exact same type of student.

OK, so what to do with all this? Well, I think it is a good general idea to try to challenge yourself across all the core areas, preferably for all four years but sometimes that fourth year might put you into a tradeoff issue. But if you are better at some things than others, maybe what that means is an objectively more challenging set of courses in one or more areas, and less so in one or more other areas. And sometimes you may not get a perfect grade challenging yourself.

And all that is OK. As you then approach college applications, you can assess where you are as a student, what are your relative strengths, what are you most passionate about, what is your current vision for what your college academic experience will look like. And then you can identify the colleges that are closest to your vision, and for which you might be a good fit. And usually if you do this with an open mind, you can find colleges like that across the full spectrum of what would be likelies, targets, and reaches for you. And your list will not be the same as some other kids’ lists, and that is actually great.

So on the one hand, I think it is a mistake for college prep kids to specialize too early in HS. But on the other, I think different kids can chart different paths and apply to different colleges, and that is the way it should be.