<p>On college admissions statistics sites, they always have % of students in top 10% of class, in top 5%, etc. and then a huge group that has “no rank”. I understand that means the school didn’t provide a numerical, 1,2,3 ranking but doesn’t it still have to give a percentile from the top (to the nearest decile, anyway)?</p>
<p>category for home schooled kids, international students, american students studying abroad</p>
<p>That’s impossible. The “no rank” category is 60-70% of the students. Unless 60-70 percent of college students are home-schooled and international.</p>
<p>My school doesn’t rank.</p>
<p>So does that mean, you don’t even put a decile in? That what I don’t get. My school “doesn’t rank”, but we still rank students by decile (top 10%, etc) on apps because they ask for it. But then why do college sites have huge #s of people who are not part of their “in the top 10% of their HS class” category?</p>
<p>No Rank simply means NO RANK. No percentile, nothing.</p>
<p>Yeah, my school says that we are so competitive that a rank will mean nothing.</p>
<p>So you don’t even give decile? Are you allowed to do that?</p>
<p>A lot of competitive schools give no rank.</p>
<p>A lot of public high schools don’t rank. The reason, or at least the reason given, is that ranking discourages students from taking AP and honors courses since the harder courses will pull their rank down.</p>
<p>A hs district that doesn’t rank will instruct all of the GC’s and other personel not to say anything to anyone about deciles or anything else.</p>
<p>Adcoms get around this to some extent by looking at the high school’s profile. The profile will typically contain a breakdown of the gpa’s by deciles. Using this info and the applicant’s gpa, they can guess where the applicant fits into the student body.</p>
<p>A rank would have meant nothing at my school. The only thing we did was declare a valedictorian and salutatorian. I had an extremely small, extremely competitive senior class. (I think about 75% of the class was in NHS by the end of the year). There were about a third or more of us that took all the hard classes and got great grades. My grades were pretty good, but not top, so I was probably only in the top 33%…which would have looked awful had we been ranked.</p>
<p>A large factor in why competitive schools do not rank is because a .01 drop in your average (assuming its numerical) can drop you from #40 to #80, such as is the case in our school. You can imagine. I secretly found out that a 94 average (3.9) is about 15% in our school.</p>
<p>DS school, an independent, does not rank. And what would decile mean in a graduating class of 24?</p>
<p>94 average at my school is like in the top 30% (I kid you not!).</p>
<p>I’ve heard of schools where there are like 40 vales. If you get one B, you go from #1 to #41. I’m not sure why this is call “competitive”, though. I think of it as being grade inflation.</p>
<p>Competitive can be two things lol.</p>
<p>1) Even though the classes are hard everyone, being so good, gets straight As.</p>
<p>2) Classes are difficult and many people dont make it to even the top 40%. Yet if they are placed in another school they would very likely be in the top 1-10%.</p>
<p>I was just kidding, but how competitive is it when everyone gets A’s? The grading is harder in inner-city schools, and it isn’t because they are comparing their students to the nationally known high schools. The grading is tougher because, hey, not everybody is supposed to get A’s. Schools where getting a B is like flunking the course could adjust their grading curve and still think of themselves as being competitive.</p>
<p>I know plenty of schools that do not use a percentile or rank for students.</p>
<p>Lots of schools release no rankings for their students, for the reasons cited above. Colleges familiar with the high school will be able to figure out roughly where a student falls.</p>
<p>My school doesn’t rank at all because it would be too difficult. In 9-10 there is one program, 11-12 there is a choice of 3. We don’t do deciles or anything either. No rank or anything.</p>