It seems like almost every university is going on and on about the percentage of their incoming class for 2023 that rank in the top 10% of their high schools. Looking at this I can’t help but wonder if kids at magnet schools are at a disadvantage. My son attends a highly rated private school we’re about 1/3 of the high school students are borders from other countries. It’s a lot tougher to be in the top 10% of a high school like that then it is for your average public school in the area. I’ve also noticed that some students for the most recent graduating class that were admitted to some very high-end schools were not necessarily in the top 10% even though the schools went on and on about 97% of their incoming class of 2023 being in the top 10% of their high schools. My son school does not rank students, but it’s pretty easy to go on the schools profile page and extrapolate which students GPAs would put them in the top 10% of their class.
Then a came across this page for Cornell University. I will attempt to attach the link here but I’m not sure the forum will allow it
https://admissions.cornell.edu/sites/admissions.cornell.edu/files/Class%20Profile%202022%20FINAL.pdf
The page states that 82.8% of the incoming freshmen are in the top 10% of their high school class. But if you note the Asterix and the note at the bottom of the page it seems to state that only about 26% of the high schools report rank.
So how does this work?
Do they extrapolate the rank of each student with in their high school based on the high schools profile data? Or, as the note seems to indicate, they only report the percentage of rank the students from schools that report the students rank. In other words are 82.8% of the students from the 26% of schools that report rank within the top 10% of their class,?
Can anyone offer any insight into this?
Yes 82.8% of the students from the 26% of schools that report rank are within the top 10% of their class, 74 percent of the kids are absent from that statistic.
Class rank is really not relevant when most high schools don’t provide it. 4 kids from my DD’s graduating class at a rigorous private school are heading off to Cornell in the fall. Based on honor society designations it is apparent that none of the 4 are in the top 10% of the class although all are excellent students… Class rank at rigorous privates and magnet public schools is not relevant to admission decisions.
Thanks. I had begun to wonder if I had made an error sending my kid to such a rigorous school as a opposed to the worst one I could find where he could’ve been at the top of his class .
Class rank has outsize importance at Texas public universities, where it is used instead of GPA, and where much of the admission class is automatically admitted based on class rank.
However, it is considered as a part of the overall academic record at many other universities. Some do not consider class rank at all.
Not necessarily. While most US high schools do not rank (e.g. #4 out of 265), many school profiles will list GPA by decile, as in the case of the OP. So while a CDS might not include 100% of students, it’s definitely higher than the percentage that receive a cardinal rank.
You should assume that students at highly rated private schools (or public schools) like Andover, Stuyvesant, TJHSST are sending kids outside the top 10% to T20 colleges. Maybe not HYPMS unless there’s a major hook. But a top 20% ranking from Andover will usually be viewed more favorably than a top 10% for East Dubuque High. And the former school will likely better prepare for college. UTexas is an entirely different ballgame.
The most selective schools have methodologies where they assign a class rank based on school profile. The high schools from which many of these graduated are such that many of their kids are top 10% kids academically in the country. Look at the top boarding schools.
The class rank becomes an issue in the large public schools and schools not well known by AOs. Unless a kid there has a real hook, most HAVE to be top 3, not 3% but 3, at times to be considered. It’s really not fair but that’s the way it is.
None of the “top boarding schools”, i.e., the Ivy feeder schools, rank their students. Also, since these schools are so full of kids with all sorts of hooks, using class rank will say little about the reasons that they were accepted to, say, Yale.
I would need to see actual data, but my sense has always been that having many kids from the top 10% is a result of preferring students with high stats. In the vast majority of high schools, a kid with a 3.9 UW GPA and an SAT over 1500 is going to be in the top 10% or higher of their school. If a highly competitive HS has kids like this in the top 20%, you’ll likely have some of those as well. It is unlikely that a selective college will prefer a kid with a 3.95 and a 1560 SAT over a kid with a 3.94 and a 1560 SAT based on that grade difference alone. However, in a very competitive HS, that grade difference can be the difference between being in the top 10% and not being in the top 10%.
Basically, class rank is often just the stats of a kid, while admissions is, supposedly, holistic.
It is true, though, as @cptofthehouse states, that, when admissions people have no real sense of how to compare students from an unknown HS to the rest of the applicant pool, based on GPA, they may use class rank instead.
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With most HSs not providing direct rank, class rank influence in admission decisions has been gradually decreasing over time. For example, each year the NACAC surveys hundreds of colleges admissions departments about a number of admissions information, including the relative importance of rank. In the 2017-18 survey, only 9% of colleges said rank in class was of “considerable importance”, while 81% said grades in all courses were of “considerable importance.” However, a decade earlier 23% said rank was considerable importance.
If a HS provides rank or enough information to derive some information about top x%, rank may be one of many criteria used by holistic, highly selective colleges. However, this does not mean you must be in the top 3 of your class, just as considering test scores does not mean that you must have a 35+ ACT. Instead I expect it’s more of one of many factors that are used to put grades in to context at different HSs, How much information rank adds to the context of grades depends on the specific ranking system (degree of weighting) and HS.
Of course, all colleges are not all the same, and rank has more/less influence at some colleges than others. As noted in earlier posts, rank is especially important within the Texas public system. The specific HS also matters, particularly in regards to whether they rank students. The OP mentioned that his son attends a selective magnet that does not directly rank students, but he believes colleges can figure out who is in the top 10%. At many selective HSs with a high concentrations of stellar students, including magnets, there are often unhooked students from outside the top 10% who are admitted to highly selective colleges. Perhaps the OP’s HS has Naviance and similar to get some more specific information about his HS.
If one’s student is in the top ten percent, it’s important.
If our supremely talented student falls outside of this artificial zone of excellence, it is natural to diminish its importance.
So many more students lay outside of the top ten percent.
It seems to make sense that 90 percent or at least a vast majority of people asked would suggest it’s not important.
Many of those people outside of the top ten percent are AOs too.
I don’t know if it worthwhile to care or not.
It hasn’t changed my life either way. As a “non” top ten person who actually has the career that pays for the top ten kid. lol.