CPS Selective Enrollment Cutoff Stats (HSAT era)

The top 5 are tightly clustered. The rank-all cutoffs for the top five schools (Payton, Northside, Whitney Young, Jones, Lane Tech) span just ~35 points. A student with a projected 870 has roughly equal odds at all five — the spread is mostly within typical year-to-year cutoff variance.

Tier matters more for top schools. The Tier 4 − Tier 1 cutoff spread is largest at the most competitive schools (50-60 points at Payton/Northside) and smaller at less competitive ones (20-30 points at Brooks/Hancock). This is because the most competitive schools have the most rank-all-eligible students, making the tier-balanced seats relatively more accessible.

Don't over-rotate on Tier 1 vs Tier 4. Tier doesn't change your odds of admission — it changes the score you need. A Tier 4 student with 870 has roughly the same chance of getting into Whitney Young as a Tier 1 student with 815. Both are competing in their own pool.

The gap between top-5 and the rest is large. Lane Tech's rank-all cutoff (~858) and Brooks' (~800) differ by 58 points. That's the spread between “straight As, very strong HSAT” and “mostly As with one B, solid HSAT.”

These are approximate cutoffs based on publicly disclosed admission data from recent cycles, supplemented by published cutoff data and parent-forum reports. The actual cutoffs vary year to year as the score distribution shifts. Treat them as a target, not a guarantee.

These cutoffs come from HSAT-era cycles, when the test half was scored as percentile × 2.2727 per section (max 225). Starting October 2026 the test is the PreACT 9 Secure, scored 1-32 per section — and CPS has not yet published how those scores convert to the 450 test points (details expected near the start of the 2026-27 school year). The 7th-grade grades → points conversion (A=112.5, B=75, C=38) is unchanged and published.