<p>When I was in prep school we wrote 3-5 page papers every week and a couple of longer term papers in History - never in English. My kids write papers, but not every single week, and sometimes there is only one longer history research paper. I never wrote anything longer than 12 pages in colleges except my thesis which was over 100. The papers my kids do write in high school are well critiqued, it’s just it takes a while for the teachers to get through them all so they don’t get them assigned as often as we did. </p>
<p>My older son, who is a junior at Carnegie Mellon, is in a major (CS) where he doesn’t write papers. He’s got lots of projects and works much, much harder than he did in high school. But he hasn’t had a problem with the humanities classes he had to take. He’s got a 3.95 GPA, so I think his preparation was adequate. He did get a B on a paper for which the comment was “This would have been a A paper if you had handed it in on time.” Apparently CS projects were more important!</p>
<p>Neither of my kids plan to take any more English classes beyond what their colleges force them to take, but younger son will likely be in a writing intensive major. *History or International Relations.)</p>
<p>I did see public school friends of mine back in the day who had no idea how to write a college paper. They had a very hard time. I don’t think my kids are in the same boat. Personally, I thought college was easier than high school because the most papers I ever had in a course in a semester was three short ones, and most were just one long paper. My kids have very good class discussions at least from the reports I hear about them.</p>
<p>One of my offspring was in the IB program at an old (but not especially well-known) boarding school. I’d say 50+ pages per year in English class would not have been untypical. College seminar-style discussion was part of the daily drill (along with robust athletic and community service programs.) I don’t think its graduates would have any trouble writing 5-7 page papers every other week in each of 4 classes at college. For the first day of college, freshman year, my progeny had a 200-page reading assignment and did not consider that a big deal.</p>
<p>However, based on many visits to Naviance, I did not observe what appeared to be a significant leg-up in admission to elite colleges for applicants outside the top 10% or so from my kid’s high school. Or, that is, with a GPA lower than about 3.5 (despite very little grade inflation at this school.) This is a HS that admits relatively many URMs, internationals, and children from Quaker families of varying incomes (so I would not expect there to be an unusually high concentration of legacies and “development” candidates for admission to top colleges). </p>
<p>If kids from the lower 75 or bottom 50% from Brearly or Andover are getting into top colleges in significant numbers, I am skeptical that it is because these schools are so so superior academically to other excellent but less well-known high schools. If it’s not due to a higher concentration of legacies or development admits, I’m not sure how to account for the difference (we’d have to examine some decent data for starters to be sure we know what we’re dealing with). Though I imagine it does add cachet to Middlebury’s freshman facebook if it’s peppered with names like “Stuyvesant”, “Thomas Johnson”, or “Choate”.</p>
<p>But as a general principle, in considering colleges we’ve paid relatively little attention to the class rank or GPA distributions. SAT scores are the only meaningful, objective, uniform national metric we’ve got (for whatever their flaws). For top private colleges, GPA/rank seems significant to me primarily in the breach. A low class rank is the “pre-existing condition” of college admissions (unless, perhaps, you are in the right plan.) If you’re in the top 10% it really does not tell you much because, as in other important matters (such as health care), this country stubbornly refuses to adopt national standards that allow all people to be treated in a consistent, rational manner.</p>
<p>Since everybody in this forum seems to know what they are talking about, I’ll ask my question.
I’m a Junior at a small (26 kids in my class) Catholic high school in West Virginia. I have 3.88 GPA (i had my b’s in junior high and 9th grade) and am ranked 5th in my class behind four 4.0 students. However, i have the hardest schedule in my high school because i have twice as many AP’s as any other student ini my grade and have doubled up english, science, and math classes throughout high school. Additionally, I have an SAT score of 2100 and an ACT of 31. When I see the top ten percent statistics i get worried that my lack of focus in 8th and 9th grade will kill my chances at getting into schools like Middlebury and Wesleyan. I know for a fact that if i transfered to the public high school i would be in the top 10%, but i have no desire to do so. Will not being ranked in the top 10% really kill my chances of getting into the schools i want?</p>
<p>yelrae55, it might. What I would do is ask if your counselor could mention in his/her recommendation the difficulty of your schedule compared to those who ranked higher than you. Most colleges are willing to forgive poor freshman year grades, and at least one (Stanford) says they don’t even look at them.</p>
<p>As someone said earlier- squishy.
I remember years ago when my old high school did rank students, and was on 4.0 scale results alone. A few people in special ed. taking 6th grade work rated higher class rank some A-B students who were taking college prep courses.
There was the expected bruhaha- Honors courses people, college prep people, general education people, everyone felt there should be a better system than only looking at final gpa. Is 3.7 with a couple Honors better than 4.0 of college prep but no honors? Is 3.6 college prep better than 4.0 of a general curriculum? So many degrees of difficulty…
School finally decided on no rankings.</p>
<p>I also agree strongly with this. Not ranking private prep or top public high school applicants help colleges to select from a large applicant base without spoiling their image. Colleges certainly know the ranks for top 10% because of Cum laude status and can compute ranking for most of the applicants from same school by looking at the reported GPA.</p>
<p>But colleges do understand that an applicant outside of top 10% at a competitive private or public still preferable than many of the top 10% at no known school. This outside of 10% can range from top 30% at HMSPY to top 70% at T30 schools.</p>
<p>DD was an excellent example of this as she was not Cum Laude at her high school after junior year and didn’t have any hooks(URM, Legacy, sports) but it didn’t affect her acceptances. She got into many colleges where some of the applicants who became Cum Laude (after Junior year) didn’t get in.</p>
<p>Well this is a topic that I find interesting. It was especially concerning for my dd who transfered from an “elite private” to a mid-range public her senior year. She was top (probably) 20% at the private (which did not rank) in a class of approx 100. For reference, the class of 2010 had at least 8 admits to Stanford along with mulitiple ivys and top LACs. 100% goes on to 4 year universities with the very bottom of the class at lower UCs (maybe some Cal-States) and lower ranked LACs (top 100). After transferring her grades from the private school (no weighted “honors” courses, limited access to APs, A- grades are 3.8, not 4.0 as in the public school system), to the public, she was in the 3rd decile at a school that reported rank. Her review of the common data set indicated her dream LAC (top 10) essentially did not admit any students from the 3rd decile. </p>
<p>Her first term grades in 5 APs, 1 honors, and 1 non-weighted class were all A’s. Her first term transcript gave her a rank of around 12/500 for that term. I think it is clear that had she attended the public school from freshman year, she likely would have received most if not all As in honors classes, weighting her GPA and upping her class rank. However, with the school switch, she essentially got penalized for having harder classes with harder grading systems and no weighting for 3 years. Let’s just say she was very concerned about this aspect of her application. </p>
<p>However, it does all end well for her. She was accepted to the top 10 LAC ED. She believes she might not have been accepted if she had stayed at the elite private as she used her experience switching schools to highlight her maturity, resiliancy, and adaptability (all good things to have when transitioning to college).</p>
<p>Bottom line is I don’t think the “top 10%” classifications really matter much at all. It’s impossible to compare students based on that criteria, especially when they may have attended schools that employ vastly different methodologies and student bodies.</p>
<p>My beef is that my son’s school does not weight but provides class rank. So someone who has taken the most rigourous schedule and has maybe gotten a couple of B’s will be ranked in the 3rd or 4th decile and the kid that has taken the easiest path is in the top 10% even Val and Sal. Not right.</p>
<p>I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived near NYC most of my life … you know, that competitive place … but I’ve concluded that it’s hard to identify strength but it’s easy to identify weakness. Is being in the second decile really a tragedy? Of course not. But when 70% of a college’s applicants are in the first decile, one shouldn’t be surprised to receive a high proportion of rejections.</p>
<p>I think the top 10% is how the hs reports it…</p>
<p>meaning even if a hs doesn’t rank-
—the hs profile does include the bands of GPAs in say the past 3-4 yrs etc and where kids went to school, APs offered etc…</p>
<p>So a college will know looking at the applicants/matriculating students current GPA s caculated by their hs and know where they are going to probably land come graduation…
–ie in which band…and if its in the top 10%…</p>
<p>I think colleges then use that in their data–not that they recalculate anything…
with that data they can say whether the kid was in the top 10%…etc</p>
<p>I suppose it hurst kids who come from pretty vigorous programs where into the 2 - 3 decimal places can make or break top 10%, top quarter…</p>
<p>If the HS is known to be rigorous and doesn’t rank then it doesn’t hurt the student even if the colleges are able to compute exactly where the student lands wrt to class rank because it doesn’t pollute their ranking/image.</p>
<p>But if the HS ranks then it certainly is unfair to student following the hardest curriculum and the school is unable to take that into account while ranking (i.e. not following a weight system)</p>
<p>If admissions is based on just one number, of course, that is going to be unfair to students who do well in other areas, but I would assume that most admissions offices do more than look at just one number.</p>
<p>However, one should expect that a more selective college will have more students in the top N% of their class, whatever N is, so that makes this statistic a reasonable one to consider, along with others, of course.</p>
<p>My son goes to a large, public, highly competitive HS. His rank is rather respectable. We are not counting on it to make any different. We expect that during the admissions process there will be a process of ‘leveling out’. Our students are told by admissions officials that they are judged not by the number of AP classes, but the number taken based on what was available to them. If you are in a smaller school and do not have many available to inflate your GPA, however take 90% available to you, that is weighted more heavily than a student that took twice as many AP classes but only took 40% of what was available to them. Their GPA may be higher, but they did not take the most rigorous schedule possible.<br>
There are also schools (GATech for one) that take all of your grades to a 4.0 scale (dropping any AP inflation), counting only core classes (Math, english, history, science, and foreign languages), they add .5pt for any AP/honors course and recalculate your GPA. I can’t imagine they are the only school that does this.
I guess what I am getting at is, regardless of how heavily the school shows they look at rank on the common data set, there is recalculation, and reorganizing of data to try to look at the students on a level field, understanding that they do not go to high school on a level field. Our students are hammered with this fact because of the Northern VA bias myth. Students from other parts of the state that are not as good ‘on paper’ often get admitted over NOVA students. This is because in NOVA the educational opportunities are so vast that the students are expected to do better. The admissions officers know the state and they know the schools. It is not a perfect system. Every year someone gets overlooked and your jaw drops, but there is a process to see who has taken advantage of every opportunity afforded them.</p>
<p>At S1 & S2’s school there is a rank provided, but a document goes with the transcript that says that there is no weighting and a student who has no honors or AP courses can be more highly ranked than one who had 8 or 9 APs. The counselors write that the schools should ignore the rankings. Must be working, kids who are ranked 185/405 are getting into top 10 schools.</p>