<p>I have a different take about this. Your high school can be a mixed factor. The admissions office keeps a rating of the academic rigor in most high schools throughout the U.S. and a rating of all of the schools in California. Each admission officer is assigned a geographic region. If they are unfamiliar with your high school, they may look up its rating. Of course, if you supply AP test scores with all 5’s, that would trump a school with a low rating.</p>
<p>If other students at your high school have stronger applications than you, that would be a problem. While you are not competing directly against your fellow high school students, I have been told by an admissions officer that it is an indirect consideration. </p>
<p>The factor that supersedes all else is that Stanford and the Ivy League schools are becoming much more holistic in their approach. Holistic is code for “using whatever criteria appeals to the admissions officer at the time she reads your application”. All admissions departments would deny this, of course. But just look at the acceptance and rejection results on this forum. Do some of them make any sense to you?</p>
<p>I believe 90% of the chance threads here are by students that have already made up their mind to apply to Stanford and they are just fishing for positive remarks. They know as well as everyone else, there is no way for anyone to predict whether a particular student will be accepted or not.</p>