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Hi, I need to know how class ranks are calculated. It's been just recent that I noticed how important it is!
Are class ranks calculated by GPA? wieghted? not wieghted? and when does it start? freshmen, sophomore, junior year when counting towards determining Valedictorians and such? Thanks for your help!

By Njboe (Njboe) on Tuesday, June 10, 2003 - 02:28 pm: Edit

Well, ranks are determined by your school GPA. Usually, schools rank freshman, sophomore, junior, seniors separately. However when you apply to college, colleges have their own scales and come up with different GPAs that may be different from your school GPA.

By Quakerboy2 (Quakerboy2) on Tuesday, June 10, 2003 - 02:32 pm: Edit

Class rank is calculated differently by each high school. It generally depends on weighted GPA. Sometimes the different years are weighted differently, e.g. senior year is worth more than freshman year. The weighting is also different for each school. Sometimes an AP class is worth a full letter grade up, sometimes only like 2-3%. Talk to your school about how they do it.

By Interesteddad (Interesteddad) on Tuesday, June 10, 2003 - 02:41 pm: Edit

At my daughter's school, rank is a running average including everything from 9th grade forward.

Grades are weighted with honors courses getting (I think) an additional .5 added to the grade in each course and AP courses (I think) an additional 1.0.

Only college prep courses are considered in the class rank. So thing like Phys Ed and Health and perhaps some of the hobby type electives (like Photography) are not.

I'm not sure what the top-ranked student's weighted average is. But, my daughter is #2 in her class with a weighted GPA of 4.3 something.

By Studiousvegetar (Studiousvegetar) on Tuesday, June 10, 2003 - 03:41 pm: Edit

At my school, they simply rank kids accoring to GPA regardless of difficulty of courses. I know so many kids that have lower ranks/GPA b/c they took APs/honor class. There are tons of kids w/ 3.9s w/ easy classes.