I wrote: “EVERYTHING you and your daughter DO…”
That could include what to omit or not to omit, asking who to ask or not to ask for LORs… Never occurred to me that an applicant has a control over the content of LORs.
Wasn’t going to respond to something as trivial as this, but I’m bored… 
Some colleges - elite ones - love to reject Valedictorians. I’d say your DD is better off being 10th and having better/more developed/interesting/unique EC’s than being a grade grubber, gaming the system by taking college or online courses.
I don’t think class rank is that important - many of the top HS in USA do not even rank. The exception in states where being top X% is auto-admit to the flagship (Texas, CA).
While absolute rank may not matter, let’s be honest: colleges do know relative rank from the school profile. And unless you attend a highly competitive high school with a track record of sending lots of students to top schools including many outside the top 10% (eg, elite prep schools), your chances to be admitted to a top college when ranked below the top 10% as estimated by the school profile is significantly reduced.
While true, that’s not germane to the OP, whose D is in the top 1.5% and may (but more than likely will not) drop to the top 4.6% .So let’s not get off-topic.
Impossible for my 2 kids to get the top rank at their school (which does rank) because they chose to play varsity sports all 4 years, which is an unweighted “graded” class at our school. The AO’s at schools like Williams and Brown I am sure dig deep into transcripts as to rigor and what was available to the applicant. As long as you are in the top “cut”, I don’t think precise rank matters much unless you are in auto admit states with specific rank cut offs, like UT.
Look at it this way: H/Y/P could have filled each of their classes for the last decade (or more) with just vals and sals, and, year after year without fail, they deliberately choose not to. That is proof there is more to the application than grades.
Aim for the top 10%. Our school doesn’t rank, but students can get an idea of the “tranche” they’re in (top 10%, top 20%, etc.) based on the school profile.
Thanks again, everyone. You’ve all been tremendously helpful. I guess some issues are universal…it’s good to know others have gone through this and survived (although the issue raised by BKSquared seems especially insane. I mean …come on. A student should have the option of making a varsity sport pass/fail if it would hurt his or her GPA. How hard is it for high schools to find a way not to punish their high achievers for being well-rounded?).
Or more to the point, a varsity sport should not have to be on a transcript, unless it is in lieu of a mandatory PE course. In which case, everybody is impacted the same (in theory, since I also don’t understand the rationale of letter/numeric grades for PE).
“Some colleges - elite ones - love to reject Valedictorians.”
Really not true, valedictorians have a higher chance of getting in, if the h/s ranks. I use the Brown example to counter people that think valedictorian is considered fluffy by adcoms, 19% of valedictorians and 14% of salutatorians get in, given Brown’s RD rate is probably 5-7%, those are good odds.
When they look at the transcript, they don’t focus on sports grades. Or band or some weird electives (except as the latter reflect judgment.) Nor middle school grades, regardless of whether the school shows them or uses them to calc GPA. (If she took, eg, advanced math in 8th, they’ll notice. But middle school is middle school.)
And the problem is that even vals and sals can miss the mark in an app/supp. It’s not some prejudice. As ski shows, it’s easy to do the simple math and see she’s top 5%, at worst. That’s fine.
The AO will know the pool applying from her hs and in the local area and see who’s added all the other classes (which may or may not be valuable.) She needs to nail her own app/supp, have the right depth and breadth in ECs, present herself as what Brown or Williams really wants. Focus there.
And if the B she may get this semester are related to her hoped-for major, that could affect. Put the right effort into bringing that up. But this is now her own race to run.
All good points, thanks again! I guess the base issue is whether the application review process is truly “holistic,” or whether an applicant has to pass arbitrary thresholds to “advance” to holistic review–and what those are. If you have a 2.8 GPA, for instance, it’s probably unlikely that Harvard will spend any time on your application. Anyway, even if that’s the case, it sounds like she’d still be above any strict cut-off for class rank from your own experiences.
lookingforward: your last point is something we’ve thought of: she’s a science/math kid, and her “struggle” (if you can even call it that) is English, so I think we’re OK there.
Her interest in Williams and Brown (and some other schools) aren’t due to their ranking, but because that’s where she thinks she will fit best in terms of school size and location, and in the chance to be with other kids who are like her. Let me add, as an aside, that I’m just blown away by Brown. I’m not the alum; my wife is, so I hadn’t had any experience with the school until a couple of years ago, when we had concerns about the IB curriculum for our daughter (she was a year ahead in math, and they wanted her to pause so her classmates could catch up), and we contacted the Brown alumni office for advice. They got us in touch with an admissions officer, who spent about a half hour on the phone with us. Talk about a place where you’re treated like a person and not a number. That personal attention for the rest of your life is what you want in a school.
One issue at Brown is that, because of the curriculum, they like to see rounded strengths. And eg, you can’t say you want to do all STEM/all the time.
You do seem to have a handle on this. Enough for now.