<p>I realize that Middlebury’s numbers include only slightly more than half of enrolled students, and that elite privates are less likely to rank than publics. My point is that I know quite a bit about admissions at Middlebury, and I’m telling you that the kids in the bottom half of their high school class in all but the most elite privates aren’t ending up at schools like Middlebury or Bowdoin (unless they’re recruited athletes, URMs, or legacy/development cases). Naviance searches from elite privates clearly show this.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about Brearley School, but I did see that 4 Brearley students enrolled at Middlebury between 2004 and 2008. I’d be interested to see where those 4 stood in their class.</p>
It seems like the kids (elite prep, elite public HS) I had classes with are borderline mentally challenged. My terrible HS wasn’t even ranked so I’ve always assumed they are from the bottom decile from their respective HS.<br>
They aren’t ending up at schools like Middlebury or Bowdoin because they ended up somewhere higher in the ranking. ;-)</p>
<p>If your kid attends an average public school that ranks, you can be pretty sure. Unless your school is clearly known to be highly competitive, beating those odds without a hook will be hard.</p>
<p>But I agree when the schools don’t rank, the colleges have way more wiggle room. It’s not just top prep schools and magnets, a kid in the top 30% at Scarsdale or Beverley Hills would have been top 5% at an average high school and colleges know it.</p>
<p>Very good public school, not elite. The possible wildcard is that she a female engineering major.</p>
<p>The interesting thing is that in looking at other school’s Naviance (we don’t have it), Lehigh doesn’t seem to have grades clustered at the tippy-top.</p>
<p>Our highly regarded public H.S. does not officially rank but they’ll tell parents where their child stands if they insist. However, we live in NJ and the top 10% are offered Edward J. Bloustein scholarships if they matriculate at a NJ college. Ergo, it’s not difficult to figure out at graduation who the top 10% are when all scholarships are announced.</p>
<p>Our poorly-regarded public high school DOES rank. I doubt whether any of the top 10% students add much to any university’s student body.</p>
<p>[Full disclosure: Fully a quarter of junior high students desert the local HS in favor of private high schools. These deserters tend to be the academically-oriented kids, who generally end up at Tier 1 and Tier 2 universities.]</p>
<p>Well, that’s because you go to Amherst, a third-tier toilet. ;-)</p>
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<p>I agree, though I picture you as a Colby kid.</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>The top tenth percentile no longer carries any meaning. The elite high schools are small, competitive, and wise enough not to rank their students, so the only schools that remain–the mediocre and unheard of high schools–have to enforce these arbitrary distinctions. It isn’t difficult for the especially hard-working, motivated, and talented kid to make top tenth percentile at any Podunk High of 5,000 or so students. The distinction loses meaning when we learn that 99 percent of Penn’s classes arrive from the top decile of their high school classes every year.</p>
<p>Instead, for these lesser known high schools, standards of scrutiny more rigorous than top tenth percentile, such as top 1% or top 5%, would be helpful to distinguish those most outstanding students so as to better help them gain admission to the top universities.</p>
<p>That’s the thing. For the most part, I think high schools behave rationally in ranking their students. </p>
<p>For large high schools that send only a small portion of their classes to highly selective colleges, ranking may be a rational marketing strategy, especially if there are multiple tracks through the high school. It tells the colleges whom the school considers to be the top candidates. That may hurt smart, ambitious students who for some reason fall outside of the top nth percent, but it probably does give a boost to those who have won the ranking competition. (Versions of the Academic Index I have seen appear to confirm that. Being able to prove reliably that you are #1 or in the top 5% is a plus.)</p>
<p>High schools that expect to send a lot of their graduates to highly selective colleges have every incentive not to rank. Sure, the colleges can quite accurately figure out approximate decile rank, given the (extensive) information these schools provide, plus often seeing multiple applications from the school year after year, plus perhaps communication with the GCs. At the very least, not providing an official rank helps the colleges out by giving them cover to accept sub-top-10% students without taking a USNWR rankings hit. And, near the top of the class, so long as everyone doesn’t apply to the same colleges (and many of these schools make certain they don’t), there is some wiggle room to promote more than one person as “the top” student.</p>
<p>My kids went to two high schools. One was a large public academic magnet, with a very diverse student body displaying a huge range of abilities. Average SATs for the school were pretty average (especially given that 99% of the graduates go to college), but the school expects to send 25-30 kids/year (less than 10%) to what we would consider top colleges. It ranks, religiously, and the ranking is obviously important to the students’ prospects.</p>
<p>The other was a prestigious private school, and ranking was completely anathema. This school generally sent maybe 60 kids/year (well over half the class) to top-20 universities or top-15 LACs. They included some recruited athletes and URMs, as well as developmentals and legacies, but mathematically the ones left over couldn’t ALL be in the top 10% of the class. (And, of course, being a legacy or a recruited athlete hardly precluded top-10% rank.)</p>
<p>Our school district has several selective academic magnet programs, each of which chooses students from either the entire county or half the county. The students who attend the magnets are among the very top students in the county. They represent a substantial fraction of the graduating class of the schools where the magnets are located.</p>
<p>Now consider the case of Johnny, who is not a magnet-caliber student but attends a school that contains a magnet, versus Susie, also not magnet-caliber, who attends a school that does not contain a magnet. Assuming that they take the same courses and get the same grades, Susie will have a much better class rank than Johnny. That’s because the ultra-top students in Susie’s neighborhood don’t go to the neighborhood school – they’re at the magnets. Thus, they don’t compete with Susie for class rank. Meanwhile, poor Johnny attends a school that imported many of those ultra-top students from other neighborhoods. Johnny has to compete not only with the best students from his own neighborhood but with these other top students bused in from many miles away. </p>
<p>Is this artificially induced difference in class rank fair to either Susie or Johnny? Of course not. That’s one of the reasons why our district doesn’t rank.</p>
<p>after reading all this, my bottom line is, there is a lot of ‘games’ being played by the high schools, ranking agencies, and the colleges themselves.</p>
<p>Given that GPA from one school can’t be directly compared with one from another school, and the ranking is also subject to all sort of “tinkering”, do adcoms in selective and competitive universities/colleges conscientiously try to crack the code and evaluate kids as fairly as possible??? The politically correct answer is yes, but we all know psychology: mind will always try to find a solution that requires least amount of energy investment. It’s much easier to just look at the numbers presented on the paper and go from there, than to wrack one’s brain to decipher the true meaning of all the numbers and figures.</p>
<p>HR Jr S2 will be aiming at Top 30-60 range schools, and I wonder how this is going to play out.</p>
<p>At these schools today, for top colleges, the kid really needs to be val or sal. At a mid tier ivy–Dartmouth–40% of the ranked are val or sal. When you add in the hooked, that’s most from even solid high schools.</p>
<p>At my kids’ moderately well-known public high school, the val-sal thing clearly does not apply. Applications to Dartmouth are pretty rare, but in recent years several outside of the top 2 have been accepted at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Columbia, MIT. Not many (any?) outside of the top 10 at those schools, though.</p>
<p>As for ranking unfairness between schools . . . in this district, a kid who isn’t at a strong academic magnet school has to walk on water (or be one heck of an offensive lineman) to have any chance at all at a meaningfully selective college. Neither Johnny nor Susie, notwithstanding her high rank, would have a shot.</p>
<p>That’s a reasonable assessment. 6 people enrolled at Middlebury from HCHS, an elite public in New York, and the GPA and SAT of the average accepted student were 92.26 and 1460 respectively. See the school’s acceptance history with Yale (94.32 and 1510), and you’ll discern little difference between the academic strength of the students who are admitted to and ultimately enroll at either school. One cannot assume that “recruited athletes, URMs, or legacy/development cases” from the elite high schools were in very bottom of their classes.</p>
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<p>Forgive me if I hurt your feelings, but even being ranked first or second at a “third-world toilet,” as you put it, doesn’t entitle you to condescend to your peers at a premiere liberal arts college, regardless of where they may have come from.</p>
<p>From personal experience top 10 percent makes a big difference. Some schools do not rank but stamp the transcript with top 10 percent. It makes a difference in the sorting out process and potentially choosing between two candidates. The college admission process is very competitive.</p>
I wasn’t ranked first.
But after working with some of my “peers” I realized the TTT High I hailed from wasn’t that bad. They touted their HS like it’s Caltech and their academic achievement fell short. And they still say things like the top 40% are way better than the top 10% from some random public HS.
“but you’re not smart” said yours truly.
“but if I went to a public high school, I would be a top student” said one of the students
Then I rolled my eyes and condescended. =)</p>
<p>Our high school does okay. From my older son’s class Val got into Yale hooked and Harvard unhooked. Sal into Wharton. No. 3 is at Caltech (unhooked) No. 4 is at Princeton also unhooked. There are other kids at Ivy’s from that class too, though I can’t remember them all - though I know no. 25 is at Brown. It’s not a magnet school. It’s way, way down the Newsweek list. I don’t think it made the USNWR list of high schools at all. Its average SAT scores are not much above US averages. But the top 10% of the class does very well.</p>
<p>From what I’ve seen of the classes - most of those for the top performing students are excellent. They are at least as good as any I had in prep school with the caveat that they don’t write enough papers and classes are larger than I would like.</p>
<p>Our school is large and there are huge differences between the top 10 and the bottom 10%. They do rank and they do weight grades.</p>
<p>Stop associating with students from Stuyvesant.</p>
<p>Why are you having these conversations in the first place? The work you do in Orgo Lab must not be very interesting. =P</p>
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<p>How does that prepare them for the demanding curricula of the top universities? When prep school brats are writing 50+ pages a year in English class, and leading and contributing to daily roundtable discussions, all these “top performing students” have are a solid work ethic, and the motivation and eagerness to succeed. And, all of that is going to blow up in their faces when they discover that they have to write a 5-7 page paper for each of their four classes every other week, prepare for and participate in class discussions on a daily basis, and find themselves crushed by the first bad grades in their short careers, etc.</p>