how important is rank…??? I missed the memo
i’m gonna be honest, freshman year i didn’t take any aps because i genuinely did not know how any of this worked. i’m an only child, and my parents went to college in asia, so they don’t really know the american high school and college system. i had no older siblings to tell me what classes to take, and no one really explained how important aps, dual enrollment, and weighted classes were from the start. instead, i took standard classes and got graduation requirements out of the way early, like pe and spanish, because i thought that was the smart thing to do.
now i’m taking a lot of aps and trying to raise my rank, but i feel like i started too late. right now i’m 16th/350ish and i’m hoping i’ll move up, but a lot of people ahead of me have been stacking weighted classes since freshman year. at my school, a lot of people are also taking like 10 online cc classes (weighted the same as ap) where they just cheat at the same time as ap classes. i read somewhere that if you’re applying to ivies from a small town, you basically need to be number 1 or very close to it to have a real shot, and i’m worried i could end up around top 10 or maybe a little outside of it.
how much does class rank actually matter in this kind of situation? will colleges take into account that i didn’t understand the system early on but increased my rigor later? and how are aps vs dual enrollment viewed when some people have been maximizing weighted classes from the beginning? If I’m 10th in my class will colleges know that the people in front of me only got their through cheating in DE classes??