<p>I go to a large Illinois public high school with approximately 3800 students, the graduation rate is 98.1% and the average ACT is a 22.7. I have a 3.295 GPA but am only ranked in the top 46%.</p>
<p>No one’s going to be able to give you a good answer. Anyway, it won’t matter much for admissions (unless your school is like top 50 in the nation). </p>
<p>Sent from my HTC VLE_U using CC</p>
<p>Seems about average.</p>
<p>What are you trying to get at? You won’t get any ‘leniency’ from any selective schools with that class rank.</p>
<p>cortana431 - Are you saying that if you go to a top school, admissions officers may give you leniency for certain grades? For example, if you go to a public school ranked 5th in the nation for STEM, would that give you any advantage, assuming you are in the top 10%?</p>
<p>^ It should… They’ll know that the grades you’ve earned aren’t from sucking up and that you’re proven yourself to be the best of the best (assuming the school has a test to get in). Whenever I visit schools and mention my top 10 STEM school, the admissions officers are always really familiar with it. A 3.1 at Thomas Jefferson is probably worth just as much as a 3.8, if not more, in a school that isn’t top 100.
@OP: standardized test averages, while not very important in the real world, help tell whether or not your school is competitive. I don’t think your school’s ACT average is very high, so I doubt it.</p>
<p>Mainly i’m concerned with my upcoming application to UIUC.</p>
<p>@nyctemp - Yeah, I assume that a top 10 STEM school (like mine) will be regarded a bit more highly then others. However, I wouldn’t go as far as saying a 3.1 at TJ would be worth a 3.8 at a school not ranked in the top 100.</p>
<p>Your school is a decent public school (somewhat above-average ACT and an impressive graduation rate), which I’m assuming is pretty much your typical white suburban upper-middle class public school. </p>
<p>It is not competitive but it is not really a poor school by any means, so you’re really no different than from the backgrounds of 90% of other applicants. I wouldn’t expect your school to work for or against you in any way. </p>
<p>(But then again, I don’t really know your school - this is just what I’m assuming.)</p>
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<p>Not really, what I mean is that students applying to ivies and similar caliber schools (in selectivity) are expected to be at or close to the top of their class, resulting in few students, if any, accepted to and attending those schools (usually those at the very top of the class or hooked students), but it’s different for the highest ranked high schools where the student body is much stronger and many of the students there have high academic stats hence why a higher number of students are accepted to highly selective institutions. Top 10% class rank in most cases will count you out of highly selective schools but at schools like TJ it’s different and you may still have a shot, because the class is much more competitive.</p>
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<p>That’s not what I said/meant. I don’t know how grading works at TJ but you still need A’s or similar grades to be competitive for top schools. </p>
<p>I have heard that some schools give a slight bump to applicants from the top preparatory schools and high schools because they are expected to be stronger but I am not certain of that validity.</p>
<p>Your school is on the competitive side, but it doesn’t seem to be in the top few hundred or anything. It might be in the top thousand, but probably not. What matters more than how competitive your school is, though, is how well you do within it. Get the best grades you can and no one will be able to say that you aren’t as worthy as people with equal or lesser grades but from better schools.</p>
<p>It’s been ranked in the top 700 nationally recently.</p>