<p>At my middle school, they don’t rank. I know that I am in the top 16 kids out of 320 in my graduating class, because of the accelerated maths course that I take, and that I have a higher grade in maths than at least half of them, which would put me at about 8/320. Will the prep schools figure that out, or, as most middle schools don’t rank, do they just not even care that much about rank, and just sort of approximate the level of difficulty in your courses?</p>
<p>thats just math. thats one out of 5 courses. ranking is gauged by overall gpa. and honors classes shouldn’t be weighted. they do care about rank because they says that most are in the top 2% of their original school and they ask for it, even if the school doesn’t rank, so they really care about it. </p>
<p>do you go to public or private?</p>
<p>i think the ranking is just so they have an idea of where you stand and your ability at their school if you were to attend. 16/320 is very good btw.
grades and the difficulty of the course is more important.</p>
<p>actually, only one of my applications asks for the approximate ranking (maybe i just remember one, but i know not all of them asked for it)</p>
<p>blairt, I know that ranking is based on all classes, but all other classes are equal to everyone’s, and plenty of kids get A’s in them. And it’s not our of five courses, it’s out of eight. Honors geometry is the highest course you can take, and one of two courses that are honors (the other is honors algebra, which I took last year). Actually, with GPAs, since we don’t have weighting, I guess that you really can’t rank with just numbers. That’s more with difficulty and numbers.
I attend public school.</p>
<p>prettyckitty-</p>
<p>Since you’re in the top 5% of your class, that’s great and your school/guidance counselor can report it as such even though your school doesn’t rank. I highly doubt the schools you’re appying to need any more gradation than “top 5%”.</p>
<p>That’s true, my vice-principal will probably put something like that in. Still, it is a Berkeley school, so the administration is kind anti-competitive. It doesn’t matter too much, anyway, I suppose. It’s kind of too bad we don’t have guidance coulselers, as the vice-principal doesn’t see the students very much. Still, I’m one of the lucky ones; she knows me as better than almost everyone who hasn’t been suspended several times or been up for explusion.</p>