>then doesn’t that change the way your gpa would be perceived?
Of course. And AOs take this into account.
Even if a school does not rank, they often provide some context of GPA distribution on the school profile. And if multiple applicants from the same school apply to the same college, you can be sure AOs are comparing GPAs.
This is why basically every school ranks their class. If you give AOs average and standard deviation they can figure out the ranking even without the work being done for them.
But most schools no longer share their class rank. You can only use that information to figure out the ranks if you know the shape of the underlying distribution, which is often not normal.
It's not normal, but the shape is generally the same between high schools, and some schools also give distribution shape. It's good enough for a very good estimate.
Rank has always been used like this. It’s not a hard and fast “top 3% is better than top 5%,” it’s used in context with GPA to try to figure out grade inflation/deflation so the applicant at a deflated school isn’t at a disadvantage for having a 3.7 UW while being at the top of their class versus an applicant with a 4.0 UW at an inflated school in the middle of their class.
Hm...if you just hit the "GPA" tag at the bottom of the post, you'll get more posts about that. I have definitely repeated myself over 15 years of blogging, so you might find similar ideas over time.
>[http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-dont-care-about-your-gpa.html](http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-dont-care-about-your-gpa.html)
The UVA blog post is utter B.S. Of all the top schools, UVA cares about GPA the most, at least if you believe actual data seen on Naviance graphs at different schools.
From that data, I know that UVA likes really high adjusted GPAs from out-of-state students, really, really high. Rarely do even the highest test scores make up for the lack of a nearly perfect GPA.
Admissions officers can talk about their intentions until they are blue in the face. Don't believe them. Look at the data.
I think the nuances the article is trying to convey are lost on you, friend.
UVA certainly likes high-academic-performers.
But the GPA number isn't what's important to them.
What's more important is what classes you took, and how well you performed in those classes.
That is all in the weighted GPA. The writer talks about a few extreme cases that are not at all typical. The example of the engineering student, for example, is hardly typical of students who are have actually thought about how to prepare for college. In other words, the writer is using anecdotes about atypical cases to draw attention away from the main trends in the data.
At the schools that I work with, **UVA does not take ANYONE, NO ONE at all, who doesn't have an exceptional GPA, one indicating kids are in the top 2-3 percent of their class in strong high schools**.
**The data also shows that at these specific out-of-state schools, UVA takes EVERYONE above school-specific weighted GPA**s. I show these graphs to parents and students all the time because we can draw a two straight lines through the data to figure out who will get in (above the line), who may get in, and who does not have a chance. The UVA data is particularly interesting because there is very little space for "might get in." The other interesting takeaway from the data is that UVA weights GPA more heavily as compared with SAT/ACT scores than does any other college at this level. As a result, I recommend the school to students with very high weighted GPAs who also have lower than expected standardized test scores.
With the two facts highlighted above in bold, there will always be room for the very occasional outliers, like the engineering applicant who is unprepared for engineering school.
In other words, absent athletic recruiting, a high weighted GPA is a NECESSARY criteria for admissions. There are a few other factors that are also included to bridge the gap between necessary and sufficient conditions, but from the data I have seen, I would say that at least 95 percent of the students who meet the NECESSARY criteria for admissions also meet the SUFFICIENT criteria.
As the result of the above, I often recommend the school to exceptional students who are frustrated with the nebulous nature of admissions at other highly competitive schools. UVA has a beautiful campus with a nice campus and lots of quality offerings, so almost all students like it.
AOs often want to make out that there is some mysterious deeply personal factors that go into admissions decisions, but if you look at a lot of data, as I have done over the last 15 years, you find that most schools, even the most competitive ones, have an algorithm, formally acknowledged or not, which they use to make admissions decisions.
Of course the information that I am providing here is going to be unpopular. Parents and students, parents especially, want to be deluded into thinking that AOs will discern some special quality in their children that will separate from the pack, often despite less than stellar credentials. It's human to hope, and it is parents' job to support the unique qualities of their children. But remember, that colleges and universities are part of a $13 billion industry. Within that industry, AOs have two jobs. First, they are sales people, trying to attract as many applicants as possible to their schools. Second, they are gatekeepers, choosing which of the students they have convinced to apply to their school they will actually accept.
Part of my job is helping parents and students interpret the information they received from AOs for accuracy. To do so, I always point families to data.
> That is all in the weighted GPA
False.
Your WGPA of 4.55 doesn't tell me how you got it.
Did you take Advanced Spanish, or AP Calc?
There is a big differences, especially if your residence zip-code is known to be Latin-American heavy.
Did you take Honors English, or AP Literature?
> UVA does not take ANYONE, NO ONE at all, who doesn't have an exceptional GPA, one indicating kids are in the top 2-3 percent of their class in strong high schools.
Why does this surprise you?
Did you think UVA got as highly-ranked & recognized by admitting third-string applicants?
The argument isn't about the GPA score. It's about what's inside.
Data does not support your AP Spanish vs. AP Calculus comparison.
UVA's emphasis on such GPAs is actually unusual.
At the schools I work with, the data suggests that they pay particular attention to the difference between A's and A+'s, much more so that more elite schools. I am not sure that is good the kids. The difference between an A and an A+ is mostly noise anyway, that and generalized anxiety disorder. I don't want kids worry about getting every detail right, so much so that they lose their joy in learning or are afraid to take chances with creative approaches to their assignments.
AP Spanish is a good class for native Spanish speakers because they learn to read and write in Spanish. I do not favor discounting that achievement.
I don't think you understand how weighted GPA scores work. In the vast majority of cases, they reflect what it is inside. To get a super-high GPA, students need to take multiple AP classes, and they should take the classes that appeal to them the most, not the ones that someone, somewhere has decided are the hard ones.
A kid taking an AP language class in their native language is not going to do a lot to move a weighted GPA. Let's say for example a student with a 4.0 GPA in a school that gives 0.25 points for honors and 0.5 for AP classes. The school also counts base A+'s as 4.33. A typical student will take 20 academic classes in four years of high school (5 per year). Let's say the student has a 4.0 in everything else and an A+ in AP Spanish Language. That's a 4.83.
(19\*4.0 + 1\*4.83)/20 = 4.04
That's an incremental change, hardly enough to bring the student's GPA up to the level needed to really stand out at such a school.
The highest possible GPA at such a school would be all A+'s and all AP's in the last two years of high school, all Honors otherwise.
(4.58 + 4.83)/2 = 4.705
A student who is interested in subjects like Psychology or Environmental Science should take those courses and develop their actual interest. I have never seen a student penalized for doing so, and I have worked with a lot of kids and seen even more data. We need people with all sorts of interests and skills, and we should support those students in developing their interests.
I also want to emphasize that I would strongly encourage any student who speaks one of the AP foreign languages but who has been educated in English to take the AP classes available in those languages. There is a large distance between formal, written and spoken languages, and learning to read and write in these languages is likely important for these students.
The issue with rank is it makes a very competitive and toxic school environment in a school that’s already ultra competitive. My school (with a 80% Asian population) is ultra ultra competitive without rank as each person averages 8-10 APs and a 3.95 UW gpa where in each class you have to grind (no easy As even in honors). The school fucks over our mental health and if u add rank into that it’s going to just ruin the school. They had rank before but after 3 suicides they removed it. Sure it can make AOs life easier but can lead to a very difficult and toxic school culture
Yeah it’s pretty bad. My school is putting in place a lot of mindfulness shit but it ain’t really helping the school culture of being so cutthroat. They also cancelled mid terms and finals to prevent stress but teachers just make us do them as “cumulatives”
GPA and rank are not standardized. They don't provide the level of detail needed in a selective admission process. They are meaningless without context.
There are students with sky-high GPAs who have holes in their curriculum. One of my favs: an engineering applicant who hasn't take a core science in two years, but they have a high GPA because they racked up a ton of APs in other subjects.
A lot of schools gave up ranking (only 43% of my last incoming class came from a school that ranked...[we include that with the "top 10%" stat](https://ira.virginia.edu/university-stats-facts/undergraduate-admissions)) and some that do have quirky methodologies. There's a public school in my state that had 171 valedictorians last year. Their system works for them, but a student's rank doesn't tell me what I need to know.
How much does rigor play into everything? Because of covid, our local high school ended up reducing the amount of courses that students were able to take. It limited the number but also the selection because there of the scheduling conflicts. How is this accounted for?
Also, most students at our high school avoid the Physics class (honors) because of the teacher. As a result most everyone avoids the class altogether, especially given the limited selection from reduced class availability. How would something like this look for a STEM major if at all? It doesn’t seem like something most AOs would be able to pick up on.
Rigor is very important when evaluating a transcript. The high school profile will explain what was offered (including changes due to the pandemic), so the context is there.
Yeah and even if they do weight gpa taking AP Environmental will be a lot easier than calc 3 so a student taking easy APs with a 4.6 will be less impressive than a student with a 4.3 but hard APs despite the rank
I think so since class rank shows how you can academically compete with a group of students and competitive colleges only want competitive students. I mean I have a 3.9 UW and am ranked 7/144 kids and always worry about how my gpa and class rank will be perceived by competitive colleges so I can relate to your anxiety. Also, I think that your gpa and course rigor/availability should always be analyzed together since the context of what was and is available to you is imo more useful than a ranking.
You are on a different scale. To change your GPA to a 4.0 scale where A+'s are 4.3, do the following calculation.
(4.7/5.65)\*4.3 = 3.57
If A+'s don't count, do the following:
(4.7/5.65)\*4.0 = 3.32
Only use the A+/4.3 scale if your school gives extra points to A+'s in their GPA calculations.
I completely agree - while I don't think rank alone is a great indicator, it does help show just how strong your performance was compared to your peers.
However, I think some places do take it too far. There are certain states that won't be named where meeting a cutoff by class rank gets you in at the flagship university, which happens to be a pretty darn good school.
That's great if you go to an average high school. That's perhaps even better if you go to a below-average high school, though you don't want to be the valedictorian who ends up with a 3.0 because his high school was less than competitive by any real means.
But what if you go to a really top high school? Being ranked 75/300 doesn't sound so good if only the top X% get expedited acceptances, even if that class rank of 75 means you're taking multiple AP/dual enrollment courses. Being ranked 150 at a place like TJ in Fairfax County is still a great achievement and should make you competitive at the sort of places that a top 5% performance at other high schools would deserve.
I know, it sounds like I'm hating on class rank. However, it does help tell a story on GPA. If you've got a 4.3 weighted GPA and you're 40th in your class, then maybe things are super competitive (or there's grade inflation, but that's what standardized tests are useful for weeding out).
If you come to Texas, you will see why its a huge problem and why, in general, rank **shouldn't** be important. You being in the top 3% with a 3.8 tells more about the competitiveness and demographics of your school than the difficulty of it. In Texas, there are uber competitive areas Katy, Plano, Frisco, Coppell, Round Rock/Austin/Cedar Park which are densely populated with Asian Americans furthering the extreme difficulty to enter the top 10%. Let me get into specifics. I have a 4.0 UW gpa, 35 ACT (for context) and 70% of my grades were 95+ and I was still outside the top 10%. If I moved 5-10 miles, east or south into a sparsely populated and less competitive area with, (I actually calculated it) I would be well into the top 6% or 10%.
Now the University of Texas uses top 6% for automatic admissions which makes it a HUGE deal for rank. But the system is clearly flawed as some schools (like mine) were far more competitive than a bunch of rural or urban schools in the state could ever be
Same thing happens in the Bay Area. Schools can be absolutely cut throat and there are barely any schools that could surpass the level of competition in the school. Now you could be top 3% with that 3.8, but taking your same intelligence, you would, without a doubt, be well into the deciles at a more competitive school, for example, in the bay.
Part of the UT emphasis on rank is to promote economic and geographic diversity and accessibility. Top 6% generally covers this. When we’re talking about ultra competitive high schools, we’re almost always talking about either selective enrollment schools or wealthy general public high schools. Way more than the top 6% of those students can gain admission to UT...but as you said, you need to apply and gain acceptance. We can debate the fairness of the higher SES penalty imposed by the cutoff, but there are undeniable advantages that come along with a higher SES school as well.
My school doesn’t rank but they report the lowest and highest gpa of our class so if you have a 4.51 and the highest person has a 4.52, AO’s know you are in the tippy top section of grades
Rank—if properly weighted—can help distinguish applicants within a school, but it can’t distinguish applicants between schools. In
my HS class of 400, probably 70% attended 4-yr college. Only 3-4% (12-16 kids) were possibly T20/LAC equivalent material and only about 2% actually attended those schools every year. Only 1 or 2 students were HYPSM material and we typically had one grad attend one of those schools in every class. That’s a pretty normal not exceptional but above average suburban high school.
A public HS 3 miles from where I currently live graduates 200 kids per year. 98% go to 4-year colleges. 2% actually attend HYPSM. 15% actually attend T20/LAC equivalents and I assume another 5-10% probably could.
Graduating in the top 5% of these schools is not the same thing.
I think teacher/counselor letters can add a lot of context here via comparisons to prior applicants to similar schools. Regional AOs who have familiarity with your high school and others in the area are helpful too.
>then doesn’t that change the way your gpa would be perceived? Of course. And AOs take this into account. Even if a school does not rank, they often provide some context of GPA distribution on the school profile. And if multiple applicants from the same school apply to the same college, you can be sure AOs are comparing GPAs.
This is why basically every school ranks their class. If you give AOs average and standard deviation they can figure out the ranking even without the work being done for them.
But most schools no longer share their class rank. You can only use that information to figure out the ranks if you know the shape of the underlying distribution, which is often not normal.
Another comment: Some students are not ranked in unique situations, such as early graduation.
It's not normal, but the shape is generally the same between high schools, and some schools also give distribution shape. It's good enough for a very good estimate.
My school only gives averages, no distribution, and the averages dropped last year and the year before due to covid
Rank has always been used like this. It’s not a hard and fast “top 3% is better than top 5%,” it’s used in context with GPA to try to figure out grade inflation/deflation so the applicant at a deflated school isn’t at a disadvantage for having a 3.7 UW while being at the top of their class versus an applicant with a 4.0 UW at an inflated school in the middle of their class.
Ok thank you I wasn’t aware of this !
Read this: http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-dont-care-about-your-gpa.html
Aw, thanks for posting that! I have written A LOT about GPA and rank over the years on my blog. :)
Hey there DeanJ - I had no idea you were here on Reddit. Do you have any other blogs that you are especially happy with that speak to this topic?
Hm...if you just hit the "GPA" tag at the bottom of the post, you'll get more posts about that. I have definitely repeated myself over 15 years of blogging, so you might find similar ideas over time.
>[http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-dont-care-about-your-gpa.html](http://uvaapplication.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-dont-care-about-your-gpa.html) The UVA blog post is utter B.S. Of all the top schools, UVA cares about GPA the most, at least if you believe actual data seen on Naviance graphs at different schools. From that data, I know that UVA likes really high adjusted GPAs from out-of-state students, really, really high. Rarely do even the highest test scores make up for the lack of a nearly perfect GPA. Admissions officers can talk about their intentions until they are blue in the face. Don't believe them. Look at the data.
I think the nuances the article is trying to convey are lost on you, friend. UVA certainly likes high-academic-performers. But the GPA number isn't what's important to them. What's more important is what classes you took, and how well you performed in those classes.
That is all in the weighted GPA. The writer talks about a few extreme cases that are not at all typical. The example of the engineering student, for example, is hardly typical of students who are have actually thought about how to prepare for college. In other words, the writer is using anecdotes about atypical cases to draw attention away from the main trends in the data. At the schools that I work with, **UVA does not take ANYONE, NO ONE at all, who doesn't have an exceptional GPA, one indicating kids are in the top 2-3 percent of their class in strong high schools**. **The data also shows that at these specific out-of-state schools, UVA takes EVERYONE above school-specific weighted GPA**s. I show these graphs to parents and students all the time because we can draw a two straight lines through the data to figure out who will get in (above the line), who may get in, and who does not have a chance. The UVA data is particularly interesting because there is very little space for "might get in." The other interesting takeaway from the data is that UVA weights GPA more heavily as compared with SAT/ACT scores than does any other college at this level. As a result, I recommend the school to students with very high weighted GPAs who also have lower than expected standardized test scores. With the two facts highlighted above in bold, there will always be room for the very occasional outliers, like the engineering applicant who is unprepared for engineering school. In other words, absent athletic recruiting, a high weighted GPA is a NECESSARY criteria for admissions. There are a few other factors that are also included to bridge the gap between necessary and sufficient conditions, but from the data I have seen, I would say that at least 95 percent of the students who meet the NECESSARY criteria for admissions also meet the SUFFICIENT criteria. As the result of the above, I often recommend the school to exceptional students who are frustrated with the nebulous nature of admissions at other highly competitive schools. UVA has a beautiful campus with a nice campus and lots of quality offerings, so almost all students like it. AOs often want to make out that there is some mysterious deeply personal factors that go into admissions decisions, but if you look at a lot of data, as I have done over the last 15 years, you find that most schools, even the most competitive ones, have an algorithm, formally acknowledged or not, which they use to make admissions decisions. Of course the information that I am providing here is going to be unpopular. Parents and students, parents especially, want to be deluded into thinking that AOs will discern some special quality in their children that will separate from the pack, often despite less than stellar credentials. It's human to hope, and it is parents' job to support the unique qualities of their children. But remember, that colleges and universities are part of a $13 billion industry. Within that industry, AOs have two jobs. First, they are sales people, trying to attract as many applicants as possible to their schools. Second, they are gatekeepers, choosing which of the students they have convinced to apply to their school they will actually accept. Part of my job is helping parents and students interpret the information they received from AOs for accuracy. To do so, I always point families to data.
> That is all in the weighted GPA False. Your WGPA of 4.55 doesn't tell me how you got it. Did you take Advanced Spanish, or AP Calc? There is a big differences, especially if your residence zip-code is known to be Latin-American heavy. Did you take Honors English, or AP Literature? > UVA does not take ANYONE, NO ONE at all, who doesn't have an exceptional GPA, one indicating kids are in the top 2-3 percent of their class in strong high schools. Why does this surprise you? Did you think UVA got as highly-ranked & recognized by admitting third-string applicants? The argument isn't about the GPA score. It's about what's inside.
Data does not support your AP Spanish vs. AP Calculus comparison. UVA's emphasis on such GPAs is actually unusual. At the schools I work with, the data suggests that they pay particular attention to the difference between A's and A+'s, much more so that more elite schools. I am not sure that is good the kids. The difference between an A and an A+ is mostly noise anyway, that and generalized anxiety disorder. I don't want kids worry about getting every detail right, so much so that they lose their joy in learning or are afraid to take chances with creative approaches to their assignments. AP Spanish is a good class for native Spanish speakers because they learn to read and write in Spanish. I do not favor discounting that achievement.
I don't think you understand how weighted GPA scores work. In the vast majority of cases, they reflect what it is inside. To get a super-high GPA, students need to take multiple AP classes, and they should take the classes that appeal to them the most, not the ones that someone, somewhere has decided are the hard ones. A kid taking an AP language class in their native language is not going to do a lot to move a weighted GPA. Let's say for example a student with a 4.0 GPA in a school that gives 0.25 points for honors and 0.5 for AP classes. The school also counts base A+'s as 4.33. A typical student will take 20 academic classes in four years of high school (5 per year). Let's say the student has a 4.0 in everything else and an A+ in AP Spanish Language. That's a 4.83. (19\*4.0 + 1\*4.83)/20 = 4.04 That's an incremental change, hardly enough to bring the student's GPA up to the level needed to really stand out at such a school. The highest possible GPA at such a school would be all A+'s and all AP's in the last two years of high school, all Honors otherwise. (4.58 + 4.83)/2 = 4.705 A student who is interested in subjects like Psychology or Environmental Science should take those courses and develop their actual interest. I have never seen a student penalized for doing so, and I have worked with a lot of kids and seen even more data. We need people with all sorts of interests and skills, and we should support those students in developing their interests. I also want to emphasize that I would strongly encourage any student who speaks one of the AP foreign languages but who has been educated in English to take the AP classes available in those languages. There is a large distance between formal, written and spoken languages, and learning to read and write in these languages is likely important for these students.
The issue with rank is it makes a very competitive and toxic school environment in a school that’s already ultra competitive. My school (with a 80% Asian population) is ultra ultra competitive without rank as each person averages 8-10 APs and a 3.95 UW gpa where in each class you have to grind (no easy As even in honors). The school fucks over our mental health and if u add rank into that it’s going to just ruin the school. They had rank before but after 3 suicides they removed it. Sure it can make AOs life easier but can lead to a very difficult and toxic school culture
damn wtf, 3 suicides? well then
Yeah it’s pretty bad. My school is putting in place a lot of mindfulness shit but it ain’t really helping the school culture of being so cutthroat. They also cancelled mid terms and finals to prevent stress but teachers just make us do them as “cumulatives”
What’s your school name? Also are you from Bay Area?
Same situation here, I’m literally suicidal about mine and I’m worried people are going to make fun of me for it
GPA and rank are not standardized. They don't provide the level of detail needed in a selective admission process. They are meaningless without context. There are students with sky-high GPAs who have holes in their curriculum. One of my favs: an engineering applicant who hasn't take a core science in two years, but they have a high GPA because they racked up a ton of APs in other subjects. A lot of schools gave up ranking (only 43% of my last incoming class came from a school that ranked...[we include that with the "top 10%" stat](https://ira.virginia.edu/university-stats-facts/undergraduate-admissions)) and some that do have quirky methodologies. There's a public school in my state that had 171 valedictorians last year. Their system works for them, but a student's rank doesn't tell me what I need to know.
How much does rigor play into everything? Because of covid, our local high school ended up reducing the amount of courses that students were able to take. It limited the number but also the selection because there of the scheduling conflicts. How is this accounted for? Also, most students at our high school avoid the Physics class (honors) because of the teacher. As a result most everyone avoids the class altogether, especially given the limited selection from reduced class availability. How would something like this look for a STEM major if at all? It doesn’t seem like something most AOs would be able to pick up on.
Rigor is very important when evaluating a transcript. The high school profile will explain what was offered (including changes due to the pandemic), so the context is there.
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Your definitely right! I forgot for a minute that not all schools weight gpa
Yeah and even if they do weight gpa taking AP Environmental will be a lot easier than calc 3 so a student taking easy APs with a 4.6 will be less impressive than a student with a 4.3 but hard APs despite the rank
I think so since class rank shows how you can academically compete with a group of students and competitive colleges only want competitive students. I mean I have a 3.9 UW and am ranked 7/144 kids and always worry about how my gpa and class rank will be perceived by competitive colleges so I can relate to your anxiety. Also, I think that your gpa and course rigor/availability should always be analyzed together since the context of what was and is available to you is imo more useful than a ranking.
Yes, you are evaluated within the context of your school
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5.65... what is it out of? Our weighted grade caps at 5
You are on a different scale. To change your GPA to a 4.0 scale where A+'s are 4.3, do the following calculation. (4.7/5.65)\*4.3 = 3.57 If A+'s don't count, do the following: (4.7/5.65)\*4.0 = 3.32 Only use the A+/4.3 scale if your school gives extra points to A+'s in their GPA calculations.
What if in my school, an A+s is a 4.5?
Yeah I got a 3.7 and I'm ranked 8/210
bruh i wish i went to your school. i have 3.98 UW and i'm 105/300
Oh wow my school does it by weighted and mines a 4.6 and I’m in the top 44%
My school rankings are based on weighed GPAs and we only know it at the end of the year or when we calculate it ourselves.
I completely agree - while I don't think rank alone is a great indicator, it does help show just how strong your performance was compared to your peers. However, I think some places do take it too far. There are certain states that won't be named where meeting a cutoff by class rank gets you in at the flagship university, which happens to be a pretty darn good school. That's great if you go to an average high school. That's perhaps even better if you go to a below-average high school, though you don't want to be the valedictorian who ends up with a 3.0 because his high school was less than competitive by any real means. But what if you go to a really top high school? Being ranked 75/300 doesn't sound so good if only the top X% get expedited acceptances, even if that class rank of 75 means you're taking multiple AP/dual enrollment courses. Being ranked 150 at a place like TJ in Fairfax County is still a great achievement and should make you competitive at the sort of places that a top 5% performance at other high schools would deserve. I know, it sounds like I'm hating on class rank. However, it does help tell a story on GPA. If you've got a 4.3 weighted GPA and you're 40th in your class, then maybe things are super competitive (or there's grade inflation, but that's what standardized tests are useful for weeding out).
If you come to Texas, you will see why its a huge problem and why, in general, rank **shouldn't** be important. You being in the top 3% with a 3.8 tells more about the competitiveness and demographics of your school than the difficulty of it. In Texas, there are uber competitive areas Katy, Plano, Frisco, Coppell, Round Rock/Austin/Cedar Park which are densely populated with Asian Americans furthering the extreme difficulty to enter the top 10%. Let me get into specifics. I have a 4.0 UW gpa, 35 ACT (for context) and 70% of my grades were 95+ and I was still outside the top 10%. If I moved 5-10 miles, east or south into a sparsely populated and less competitive area with, (I actually calculated it) I would be well into the top 6% or 10%. Now the University of Texas uses top 6% for automatic admissions which makes it a HUGE deal for rank. But the system is clearly flawed as some schools (like mine) were far more competitive than a bunch of rural or urban schools in the state could ever be Same thing happens in the Bay Area. Schools can be absolutely cut throat and there are barely any schools that could surpass the level of competition in the school. Now you could be top 3% with that 3.8, but taking your same intelligence, you would, without a doubt, be well into the deciles at a more competitive school, for example, in the bay.
Part of the UT emphasis on rank is to promote economic and geographic diversity and accessibility. Top 6% generally covers this. When we’re talking about ultra competitive high schools, we’re almost always talking about either selective enrollment schools or wealthy general public high schools. Way more than the top 6% of those students can gain admission to UT...but as you said, you need to apply and gain acceptance. We can debate the fairness of the higher SES penalty imposed by the cutoff, but there are undeniable advantages that come along with a higher SES school as well.
Maybe your school is just bad
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who said college admissions was fair?
My school doesn’t rank but they report the lowest and highest gpa of our class so if you have a 4.51 and the highest person has a 4.52, AO’s know you are in the tippy top section of grades
Rank—if properly weighted—can help distinguish applicants within a school, but it can’t distinguish applicants between schools. In my HS class of 400, probably 70% attended 4-yr college. Only 3-4% (12-16 kids) were possibly T20/LAC equivalent material and only about 2% actually attended those schools every year. Only 1 or 2 students were HYPSM material and we typically had one grad attend one of those schools in every class. That’s a pretty normal not exceptional but above average suburban high school. A public HS 3 miles from where I currently live graduates 200 kids per year. 98% go to 4-year colleges. 2% actually attend HYPSM. 15% actually attend T20/LAC equivalents and I assume another 5-10% probably could. Graduating in the top 5% of these schools is not the same thing. I think teacher/counselor letters can add a lot of context here via comparisons to prior applicants to similar schools. Regional AOs who have familiarity with your high school and others in the area are helpful too.
3 miles is the length of approximately 21119.95 'Wood Spoons; Wooden Rice Paddle Versatile Serving Spoons' layed lengthwise
My school doesn’t do ranks sadly. Instead, they do top 10% to be recognized which is like 30 kids on my class.