North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics is a public in North Carolina, so they have the NC transcripts listing rank. Their 3 year acceptances are listed at https://www.ncssm.edu/uploads/files/244508221964214008-residential-profile-2017-2018.pdf and summarized below. .This one has selective admissions.
Duke – 118
Cornell – 48
MIT – 31
Columbia – 31
Yale – 24
Penn – 23
Caltech – 18
Princeton – 16
Brown – 15
Harvard – 13
Stanford – 13
Yes, here are the results from my school from the early round:
Stanford: 5
Cornell: 6
MIT: 0
Princeton: 2
Yale: 0
Harvard: 1
Brown: 0
Columbia: 3
Caltech: 1
UPenn: 0
Duke: 2
Northwestern: 3
Keep in mind that my school has a lot of URMs.
@anon145 I started rolling my eyes once I got to the part where Cornell and Brown were not worthy of inclusion. 8-|
Particularly since you failed to back up your own assertions with data, I was not aware that it was our job to provide proof when Google is your friend. But here’s an example. Realizing that your mind won’t change, let’s move on from attempting to debate this issue.
https://www.rtsd.org/cms/lib/PA01000218/Centricity/Domain/185/2016%202017%20School%20Profile.pdf
In Northern NJ both Bergen Academy…
https://bcts.bergen.org/images/jeflev/docs/BCA_School_Profile_2018.pdf
https://bcts.bergen.org/images/jeflev/docs/BCA_School_Profile_2018-19.pdf
and Newark Academy
https://newarka.myschoolapp.com/ftpimages/85/download/download_1668455.pdf
are public schools that don’t rank students and routinely send multiple kids to the same Ivy. Not saying it’s a common occurrence at most public schools but at magnet schools like the aforementioned it is the norm. They don’t rank because of the competitive nature of the admission process to these public magnets.
I can’t however identify a local public that does rank that has similar results. I can’t say definitively they don’t exist but far and few between to @anon145 point I suspect.
In terms of excluding Cornell and Brown I would consider the following total acceptance stats from last year;
Stanford 4.3%
Harvard 4.6%
Princeton 5.5%
Columbia 5.5%
Yale 6.3%
Caltech 6.5%
MIT 6.7%
Brown 7.2%
U Chicago 7.2%
Duke 8.3%
Penn 8.4%
Dartmouth 8.7%
Cornell 10.3%
Not sure of your logic behind the suggestion.
@Data10 NCSSM may have a special exemption to ranking. I’d be interested in knowing as when I attended in the 80s there was no ranking and they made a big deal of NOT ranking to foster a more collaborative environment as opposed to a competitive one.
@anon145 I would guess that Lawrenceville’s student body is similar to NCSSM’s. One of my D’s roommates last year attended Lawrenceville and she is from Buck’s County, PA.
Even though D’s school doesn’t rank, that doesn’t mean colleges don’t know where they stand. Every year our school posts the School Profile that colleges get. No rank, but breaks down GPA by percentages. For the class of 2018:
5.0-4.5 - 7%
4.4-4.0 - 20%
3.9-3.5 - 35%
3.4-3.0 - 26%
2.9-2.5 - 9%
2.4-2.0 - 2%
1.9-1.5 - 1%
56% of the class of 2018 matriculated to schools ranked as Most Competitive and Highly Competitive by Barron’s. They may not know exact rank, but pretty easy to tell where a kid with a 3.7 stands in the scheme of things.
Interesting @njwrestlingmom Our HS dropped ranking maybe 10 years ago and now only puts the median Weighted GPA on the school profile (class of 900+). Of course GCs still do know each kids’ ranking, and I wonder how often they communicate it to AOs, especially the ones they have a relationship with and/or those who ask.
@Mwfan1921 my S17 went to a different high school. That high school said they didn’t rank - I found out senior year that was just what they told colleges for kids outside of the top (my son was nowhere close to the top). At graduation there was a Val, Sal, sashes for other top students. They don’t publish their college profile so I’m not sure what information was given. D’s school is very detailed -every AP taken is show with the number of kids who got a 5, 4, etc… So while they don’t rank, it’s pretty simple for a college to get the info they need to make the call.
@Data10 NCSSM is a RESIDENTIAL CHARTER school
that takes a handful of kids typically the best 3-5 from each North Carolina county. It also has 75 merit scholars (99%tile PSATs) in each class. that is not anything like a typical public school. You are nuts if you think a statewide residential that takes the best students from each of 100 counties is a typical public school that ranks
@NJWrestlingmom folks are missing a second point, there are 30-40 unweighted 4.0 kids in each of our high school classes. If completely unranked they’d all be in the “top” category. Again no one yet has found a public school that is not residential selective that ranks or charter for a city of 5 million people , or an elite bording school from the northeast (exeter). that has non-athlete multiple kids each year getting into HYPS schools. There clearly are feeder schools to HYPS but they are not non-residential non-charter public schools.
@dolemite you are correct “Academics
NCSSM students are NOT GIVEN A CLASS RANK and are encouraged to strive for their best rather than competing against other students.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_School_of_Science_and_Mathematics
congrats @skieurope you found a typical public school that got 2 kids into harvard, 0 yale, 0 princeton. It also doesn’t mention whether pennsylvania public ranks their kids. It seems pretty common sense to me that if 30-40 kids at a school get straight As but the kid ranked 28 got the 36 on the ACT that kid is less likely to get into elites than unranked straight As and a 36. It seems silly to argue ranking helps someone not in the top 10 for elite schools.
@anon145 I am not sure anymore what you are searching for. Yes, the North Carolina requirement that public schools rank students is likely a DISADVANTAGE for some students in college admissions. That is one of the reasons why virtually 100% of US private schools have eliminated ranking (families won’t pay big $ for something that disadvantages their kid) and why >50% of public schools have also eliminated ranking.
I don’t think waiting for someone on CC to come up with schools is very worthwhile, if you are so motivated you can go to high school ranking on US NEWS, Niche or Polaris List and start researching.
My suggestions, and I am trying to truly be helpful, are to advocate for a change, starting with your local school board. North Carolina will never change its policy unless taxpayers advocate for something better with regard to class rank, and it seems like there is tons of data suggesting there are better ways. Meanwhile find out what latitude schools have in reporting rank—for example, can they do it by quartile or decile? Perhaps there is latitude that would rank kids in ways that are less disadvantageous than for example, a 1-500 ranking. Good luck.
I agree with anon145 mostly, about large public HS. (sorry don’t know how to link names)
However, for HYPSM type of admission, I don’t think it matters as much if the student is #1 or #15, because they are looking for other achievements - national-level awards, special hooks etc. In a large public HS, the Val is not necessarily one of the smartest, but someone who has taken the most APs or weighted classes, and did not do anything else, whereas, #20 could be a ISEF finalist because of her deep interest and research in Math.
I do agree that HYPSM takes only 1-2 from these kind of schools, no matter what.
Our magnet HS has stopped ranking Val/Sal mainly to discourage the extreme steps some students were taking to raise their ranking, taking AP Chem or AP Chinese by native speakers in freshman year etc. Band, Orchestra, Chorus, Art kids can get behind, because those classes are not weighted.
This year, we haven’t seen any SCEA/EA acceptances, all were deferred. I doubt that anyone would get in RD. There was 1 H acceptance few years ago, and that student was quite a surprise, capable and smart, but still quite unexpected. Maybe he lucked out that year, when H increased their engineering enrollment, who knows ? Same with Princeton kid, many students were shocked that he got in, but again who knows what was in his app ?! But there was at least 1 S acceptance every year, and those kids have always been exceptional. Many students from this school go to Duke and a couple get full-rides. This is a very competitive magnet school with many exceptional students that it gets hard to stand out sometimes.
“North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics is a public in North Carolina,”
Ok so I googled it based on anon’s comments, and he/she is right. It’s a two year school and you have to take the SAT or ACT to get in, among other things. So if they take kids who scored say a 1400/30 as a tenth grader, they’re going to do well wrt college admissions. This is not a typical neighborhood school, where the kids come from district lines.
@Dolemite " NCSSM may have a special exemption to ranking. I’d be interested in knowing as when I attended in the 80s there was no ranking and they made a big deal of NOT ranking to foster a more collaborative environment as opposed to a competitive one."
Dolemite - you got into this school? nice job 
I may have to respect your posts more now.
“It seems silly to argue ranking helps someone not in the top 10 for elite schools.”
They don’t help for sure, but is anyone arguing that they do? That’s why more and more don’t rank and if you are a competitive public one (neighborhood, say 60 or so 4.0s), in the bay area, you definitely don’t rank.
“I don’t think it matters as much if the student is #1 or #15, because they are looking for other achievements - national-level awards, special hooks etc. In a large public HS, the Val is not necessarily one of the smartest, but someone who has taken the most APs or weighted classes, and did not do anything else, whereas, #20 could be a ISEF finalist because of her deep interest and research in Math.”
I don’t know how these negative stereotypes of vals and sals keep getting perpetuated. Disclosure - I was neither, and not even ranked in top 10% of my class. But the vals and sals were the smartest, at least in the good ole days when I applied. I knew a few and they did fine wrt college admissions.
And for class rank, Stanford used to publish (and I think Brown still does), 95% of Stanford’s class was in the top 10%, so if you’re 15 or 20 in class of a hundred, it’s not impossible, but it’s not going to help. BTW, I know a few ISEF finalists and have excellent academic record, maybe not a 4.0, but not below top 10% in the class.
@theloniusmonk : In my kid’s school, top students differ within 0.1 GPA, so most often Val/Sal are the ones who know how to game the system by taking 15-18 APs and they don’t have room to do much else. This is how it is, and am glad our school got rid of ranking, and recognizing Summa cum laude, Magna cum laude etc.
This is what I see. Again, this is a very competitive magnet school where there are a lot of academically driven kids. OTOH, our suburban neighborhood school got their 1st Harvard acceptance this year, and she is not only the Val but also high-achieving in other ways.
@Dolemite You are correct that NCSSM does not rank. That is not a typical high school though, where they admit the best students from each county based on grades, SAT, ECs - sort of a mini-college app. The last year, they had 95 NMSFs out of 300 students.
You can’t have it both ways. Your previous post mentioned rank is important for NC high school students because NC law requires HSs to include rank on the transcripts, even if Harvard says they do not consider class rank . Now you say that rank is not important for the referenced NC high school students with high rates of HYSPM… acceptances because they do not rank.
My post explicitly mentioned that NCSSM is a selective public high school – not a “typical public” and not a charter — and high schools having selective admissions is the key reason why NCSSM and most so called “feeder” high schools have high rates of HYPSM… acceptances.
Roughly 1% of HS seniors apply to Harvard each year. The rate of applications is no doubt higher among private school students, higher among selective high school students, and higher among various other not “typical” publics; so it’s a safe bet that the rate of applicants among “typical publics” is less than the overall average. If I am generous and assume a 1% application rate and 5% acceptance rate at “typical publics”, then that means you’d need a senior class size of 4000 students to expect an average of 2 Harvard acceptances each year. I’m not aware of any HS in the united states with this large a senior class size. However, it is still possible to have a multiple Harvard acceptances from a non-selective public, such as the example mentioned in my earlier post with a public high school in a wealthy area that was ~10 miles from Harvard and MIT. Both factors (wealthy and located by “elite” HYPSM… typie private college) tremendously drive up the number of highly qualified applicants to HYPSM… type private colleges above the overall national average. Whether the HS ranks students or not has far less influence, particularly for Harvard, which says that they do not consider rank.
Actually, Harvard does look at the rank/class%, its at the top of its all-important evaluation form: Exact Rank: and % Rank:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/breakdown-of-the-harvard-admissions-process-1540287000
But regardless, you are right that it can appear pretty random, as the chance for an average high school is about 1/2000—for the average graduating class size of 200 that means one in ten years.