Reply to Maryland's #1 High School ranked Lower than VA's #3

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[quote=Anonymous]00:43 poster again. Yes, of course, colleges care about class rank. An admissions officer at a top liberal arts college once told me that the best predictor of academic success in college is academic success in high school -- i.e., your grades and your class rank. The SATs measure aptitude, not achievement -- and they say nothing at all about your study habits. Chances are that if you manage to reach the top of your class at even a middling school, you know how to learn, how to study, how to organize your time, etc. That translates well in college. It's harder for the admissions officer to tell if the middle-of-the-pack student at a top school who is taking several AP classes is in the middle of the pack because everyone else is so smart, or because their study habits just aren't that great.
The other factor that works to your advantage as a top student at a middling school, and against you if you are the opposite, is that the reality is that any given top college is only going to take so many people from any given high school. Harvard isn't going to take 30 students from Whitman, even if all 30 Whitman applicants to Harvard score higher on the SAT then the valedictorian at some lower-ranked high school. Harvard is going to spread their acceptance letters around, to different schools, different regions of the country, etc. Those 30 Whitman applicants aren't competing against the kids at lesser academic schools for those Harvard slots; they're competing against the other kids at Whitman who want to go to Harvard. Now, it may certainly be true that the middling Whitman grad is still far better prepared to immediately step in to the workload at college than the top 10 student at the middling high school. I'm sure that will be of great consolation to the Whitman grad when they are making quick work of their differential equations assignment at the University of Vermont.
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