<p>I"m guessing it’s GPA>SAT>AP</p>
<p>Still, succeeding in your classes and getting a 5 proves that your “A” is legitimate and not just grade inflation. </p>
<p>Are they as important as grades? I’m sure a Bio person who scored an “A” for her semesters by doing worksheets and receiving a 1 will drastically lower the weight of her “A”.</p>
<p>Class Rank > AP > GPA > SAT/ACT.</p>
<p>GPA > SAT/ACT > AP > Class rank</p>
<p>For seniors it doesn’t matter. Otherwise</p>
<p>GPA=SAT/ACT>class rank>AP</p>
<p>GPA=SAT/ACT>extra-curricular>essays>classrank>AP</p>
<p>GPA and SAT get you in the door. Extracurriculars break the ties. This is true for a lot of top schools; their admissions philosophy focuses on what you have done outside of the classroom.</p>
<p>Class rank and GPA are essentially the same thing, right? I’d say rank replaces GPA.</p>
<p>Rank>SAT>AP</p>
<p>Class rank and GPA are kind of different, since grading and the caliber of students varies from school to school.</p>
<p>Each AP test passed (a 3,4, or 5 mind you, not just 5’s) adds roughly 3% to your chances of acceptance to an elite university - the relationship is essentially linear.</p>
<p>So they help, but unless you do 20 of them, winning ISEF is a better way to get in.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
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<p>Depends on the school.</p>
<p>GPA is irrelevant at the University of Texas (Austin), where class rank is used.</p>
<p>Class rank is irrelevant at the University of California (Berkeley), where GPA is used.</p>
<p>Some other schools may use both, with different levels of importance relative to each other and other factors.</p>
<p>As far as which is “better” to use, both have advantages and disadvantages.</p>
<p>Class rank shows how the student compares to others – but the competitiveness of other students in the school can result in different class ranks for the same academic performance in different schools.</p>
<p>GPA theoretically compares everyone to grading standards – but varying levels of grade inflation and course rigor in different schools can make GPA not very comparable between schools.</p>
<p>^
I think I’d take a 3.85 UW valedictorian over a 4.0 top 5% any day though, right?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[citation needed]</p>
<p>Harvard doesn’t look at class rank :D</p>
<p>I think the only things that AP Scores can really mess up that are important in college admissions are your recommendations.</p>
<p>Otherwise, if you don’t like your scores, don’t send them. They are self reported 90% of the time.</p>
<p>Rank matters a ton, it shows the weight of your unweighted GPA. If your top 10% with a 4.0 obviously your school was easy, but if your a salutorian with a 3.95 it shows your school was hard and you are probably equal or better than the one of a million 4.0 kids from a diff school.</p>
<p>From what I have heard, is that as long as you are taking rigorous courses, you are fine. However, I have heard that SAT scores and GPA are important for admission, whereas APs are used for placement</p>
<p>Is there room for you to report your scores? I heard you can put them in the Additional Comments or something like that?</p>
<p>unfortunately, AP scores aren’t too important. I wish they were though because I got 5s on all of mine</p>
<p>Energize, the citation for my above assertion may be found in the paper “The Frog Pond Revisited: High School Academic Context, Class Rank, and Elite College Admissions”, by Thomas J. Espenshade, a sociology professor at Princeton. The work was based upon a dataset consisting of a basket of elite university admissions office decisions. While there are a handful of notable caveats in the data, namely that extracurricular activities were not controlled for in the analysis and that the data set the paper was based on is now 7 years old (and acceptance rates generally higher at the time), the general principle still stands. </p>
<p>While the paper only lists acceptance probabilities up to 9 AP tests per student over four years, after reading the paper I emailed professor Espenshade, who confirmed upon reviewing the data set that the relationship remained linear and statistically significant through 16 AP tests - he only cut it off at nine since at that point nearly the entire applicant body had been accounted for.</p>
<p>You can view the paper at the link below:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Frog%20Pond%20Revisited%20Espenshade%20Hale%20Chung%20Oct%202005.pdf[/url]”>http://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Frog%20Pond%20Revisited%20Espenshade%20Hale%20Chung%20Oct%202005.pdf</a></p>
<p>so no, the AP arms race is not irrelevant.</p>
<p>I would say ACT/SAT > GPA > Class Rank > (Essays, EC’s, etc.) Numbers are comparable. EC’s are less so.</p>
<p>I’ll guess too…</p>
<p>SAT/ACT > GPA=Class Rank > Essays > ECs.</p>
<p>SAT/ACT first because it levels the playing field against inflation, etc…
GPA and Class Rank together since they do somewhat correlate.
Essays before ECs because essays are easier to compare to one another.</p>