There are many numbers or metrics that colleges use as they evaluate students for admissions. Among those is class rank. Most people are familiar with this and have an idea of what it means, but let's dig a little deeper into how it is calculated and how colleges use it.
Class rank is simply where a student’s GPA ranks compared to the other students in their graduation class. The student with the highest GPA is ranked first, second highest is second and so on. However, as I’ve written about before, students really have more than one GPA. They might have an unweighted and weighted GPA (and others depending on who is looking at it) so they really have more than one rank. Weighted and unweighted rank are the most common. Some schools report a student’s exact rank while others only report rank in deciles. Students can also be tied with the same rank.
From the collegiate standpoint, the purpose of rank is to give a college some perspective on how a student performs within their school and among their peers. High schools are different from one another. Some are very large, some are very small, some schools offer a very rigorous curriculum, some schools are weaker. So, rank gives some insight into a student’s performance in a way that GPA alone cannot. Let’s say a student has a 3.85 GPA. That sounds like a great GPA, but what if there are only 22 kids in the graduating class and I learn that ten of them actually have a GPA higher than that. Maybe this student is just average. On the other hand, what if I find that this 3.85 student is ranked tenth in a class 750. Now I think this is an elite student in a challenging school. Rank gives me the backdrop to compare the student against.
It’s important to make sure that you accurately report your rank. Colleges usually ask for weighted or unweighted rank or let you choose which one to report. If you have a choice, my advice is to always report the one that sounds most impressive. At my school, we typically end up with 8-10 students by senior year who have a perfect 4.0 unweighted GPA. They usually have varying weighted GPAs, but from the unweighted standpoint, they are all tied for first. So, they can all list their rank as first, though if they listed their weighted, one of those people might be tenth.
I encourage my students not to lose sleep about that or anything related to rank though. It does matter, but it’s not the end-all. A college or university is going to see your grades and course history. They’re going to know that you might have taken some pretty hard classes and done well in them, if you indeed have. Most colleges also request a profile from the high school which provides additional perspective, and the colleges that are in the same state or region with a given high school are usually already versed in what students from that high school are capable of at a certain level.
