<p>I am just curious about ranking system.
I graduated a small-sized (really small, I mean) international school containing exactly 20 senior students. I ranked 1st or 2nd, which puts me onto top 5% or 10%ish.
Is this rank considered the same as being 5 out of 100 students? or better?</p>
<p>Graduating 1st out of 20 is definitely better than 5th out of 100. I’m not so sure regarding 2nd out of 20 vs. 10th out of 100, though… Statistically speaking, a sample of this size (20)is way too small to establish any reliable comparison, so I assume that adcoms tend to weight class rank much more lightly if your class size is small, but I can’t tell much besides that…</p>
<p>Whether your school has 20 students or 200, your ranking is meaningless without knowing the rigor of your academic program and how it compares to the rest of the students in your high school. After all, the #1 student could have taken all easy courses, while the #5 student could have taken the most demanding course schedule.</p>
<p>I got 3.91 unweighted GPA, my brother got the same, both of us having taken most rigorous possible courses (all Cambridge AS level). I happen to know that the 3rd of the class got around 3.5, but it’s very unlikely that the admission officers will take this into consideration.</p>
<p>Well, I’m also from an international school (German-state-funded Auslandsgymnasium) and we were only 28 seniors. The thing is, my class graduated with a 2.0 Abitur average, which is relatively high (don’t know how that translates exactly in the GPA scale) and it also must be said, that less than 1/3 of my class made it to the Abitur. The rest left the school, because of poor grades. I graduated with valedictorian honours with a 1.0, which was also a school-record, so I also graduated among the all-time valedictorians. So it really depends on how demanding your school is, but I don’t think, that this will matter, that much…</p>
<p>High schools in the states send a “school profile” along with a student’s transcript. I’m not sure what happens with international schools, but I imagine they send something similar. See: <a href=“http://www.bls.org/ftpimages/314/download/2010-11%20BLS%20Profile.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bls.org/ftpimages/314/download/2010-11%20BLS%20Profile.pdf</a></p>
<p>^ my school and teachers said me that I must be grateful to them that they sent recs, transcripts and fee-waivers for me. My school hasn’t sent anyone ever, to any top universities.So, despite requests, my school officials didn’t send any school profile or anything…</p>
<p>This counselor of mine hadn’t heard the name of any colleges I was applying to, including Harvard…</p>
<p>I am from outside US too…</p>
<p>Thank you all for your replies. I do know that 20 is far too small to estimate a student’s ability, but I do not think that my counselor has such thing like school profile.</p>
<p>Well, I have it even worse, my graduating class was of 10 students, so I became salutatorian (which is automatically top 20%) by only a hundredth of a point difference from the 100-scale. /:</p>