<p>In an app my recommender was asked to classify my overall ability and potential as an undergraduate researcher relative to others at same academic level. He classified me as top 10% instead of the top 5% he mentioned he would. The form also required the actual recommendation which is pretty good.</p>
<p>This is NOT a thread about which percentile I fit under. Is there a significant difference between top 5 vs top 10?</p>
<p>I’d say the difference is about 5%…</p>
<p>But seriously I’d say maybe that’s the difference between like an A and an A-, so basically, why are you worrying about something kinda trivial.</p>
<p>I think questions like that are ridiculous, because recommenders will always choose the top few choices unless the student is truly awful. It will probably make almost no difference unless they put you in the lowest percentiles.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why there would be a separate checkbox for 5% and 10% if it was not important.</p>
<p>You are obsessing about this way too much. Different applications have different percentile rankings and it is often difficult to fit the students into one of the groups consistently across all the recommendations. The letters should speak for itself.</p>
<p>Is there a significant difference? Well, yes, it means if he had to rank you against 99 other students, you’d be in the top 10 instead of the top 5.</p>
<p>Does it matter to admissions committees? Well, just speaking from my own experiences with students, yes. The top 5% is more impressive than the top 10% of students - that’s kind of the point, because getting into the top 5% is more difficult. Does it mean that you won’t get admitted? No. This is not something worth agonizing over.</p>
<p>My supervisor did not teach me any classes, but he mentioned that I was top 15%. He totally made that up, or based it on a prediction (since my school doesn’t rank students). It kinda got on my nerves, as I could have done a lot better.</p>