Class Rank Meaning in College Admission

Class rank is one of the many things that the Common App and Coalition App ask.

While many high schools rank their class, others don’t report class rank, which is why college-bound teens can answer “none” when asked about their class rank by the college application platform of their choosing.

Below, we will discuss just about everything you need to know about class rank, from how high schools rank their graduating class to which colleges and universities look at class rank in the review process.

What is Class Rank?

Class rank is the hierarchical positioning of high school students based on their GPAs. There are different class ranking systems used by high schools.

As far as class rank goes, there’s something important to know about it: it demonstrates your academic standing in your graduating class.

So, in other words, it gives a measurement of your success against your classmates.

Most of the time, class rank is printed on the student’s high school transcript.

This means that college admissions officers will learn about your class rank and whether or not they consider it when evaluating your application and deciding whether you should be offered to attend the institution.

Do All High Schools Report Class Rank?

It is said that only around 50% of high schools in the US use class rank.

Many of those that rank their class, particularly public high schools, allow their students to choose whether or not to have their class rank reported.

Most high schools that no longer rank their class are private ones.

Especially at competitive high schools where all students are high-performing, class rank can make some seem like below-average students even though they’re not, thus causing them to be ignored by colleges, especially selective ones.

Right now, some public high schools still rank their students.

However, as mentioned earlier, many of them make the reporting of class rank to postsecondary institutions during the admissions process optional.

How Do High Schools Rank Students?

High schools rank students by computing their GPAs and arranging the results from highest to lowest.

How class rank is reported depends on the class ranking system used by the secondary school.

Let’s take a look at the different class ranking systems that high schools use:

Exact

As the name suggests, an exact class rank tells the exact position of a student in the class based on his or her GPA.

For instance, it may indicate that you are number 7 out of 486 students in the class.

Decile

Once the students are arranged according to their GPAs, a decile class ranking system divides the class into 10 equal parts.

Each student in the class is then assigned a number from one to 10.

The process allows you to know if you are in the top 10%, top 40%, top 70% and so on.

Quartile

Students in the class are divided into four groups after having them arranged in order using their GPAs.

This class ranking method lets you know if you are in the top 25%, top 50% or top 75% of the class.

Quintile

Simply put, a quintile class rank points out if you are in the top 20%, top 40%, top 60% or top 80% of your class.

Your class rank is determined in this approach when the GPAs of the students in the class are arranged from highest to lowest and the entire class is then divided into five — your class rank is where you fall into.

Calculation Process

It’s no secret that your GPA can impact your chances of getting admitted to college.

The type of GPA your high school uses, meanwhile, can impact your class rank.

Using an unweighted GPA can have a considerable effect on your ranking because it takes into account whether or not you took rigorous courses in high school.

Your weighted GPA, in a nutshell, factors in the difficulty of the classes you take.

AP and IB classes are more challenging than standard high school classes, which is why they are assigned a higher value or weight each.

As a result, a weighted GPA can go as high as 5.0 instead of the usual 4.0.

Suppose you and your classmate have the same unweighted GPA of 3.9.

However, your classmate took some AP classes, but you didn’t because you focused more on participating in meaningful extracurriculars.

When it’s time to compute class rank using a weighted GPA, your classmate will rank higher than you.

However, there’s no need to worry about it if your high school uses an unweighted GPA.

How Important Is It in College Admission

Class rank used to be a major role player in college admissions.

Recently, however, many institutions of higher education no longer take it into account and instead focus on other metrics during the review process.

According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) 29% of colleges do not look at class rank.

The 42.3% that check out class rank see it as of limited importance, while only 5.5% say that it’s of considerable importance.

As a matter of fact, class rank ranks number 10 only among the 16 factors considered in college admissions.

Whether or not your class rank can have a substantial influence on your admissions chances will depend on which postsecondary institution you apply to, which means that you should choose wisely if you are unhappy with your class rank.

And this takes us to this question many high schoolers who are in the process of college search are too shy to ask…

Which Colleges Care About Class Rank?

Most institutions of higher education that consider class rank in the admissions process are public universities.

That’s because they receive lots and lots of applications, and considering class rank speeds up everything.

While many private institutions care about class rank, most do not give much weight to it in admissions.

The table below consists of the names of some of the top colleges and universities in the country, as per US News’ ranking, and whether or not they consider class rank:

Institution	Class Rank
Princeton University	Very important
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Considered
Harvard University	Not considered
Stanford University	Very important
Yale University	Very important
University of Pennsylvania	Important
California Institute of Technology	Important
Duke University	Not considered
Brown University	Very important
Johns Hopkins University	Very important
Northwestern University	Very important
Columbia University	Very important
Cornell University	Important
University of Chicago	Considered
University of California, Berkeley	Not considered
University of California, Los Angeles	Not considered
Rice University	Considered
Dartmouth College	Very important
Vanderbilt University	Very important
University of Notre Dame	Important

To know whether or not your top-choice college will consider your class rank, access its common data set (CDS) and check out section C7, where the academic and non-academic admissions factors considered are indicated.