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The story
A remark by Daisuke Hori — ‘being ranked 1st in a hensachi-45 high school class is about the same as ranking 200th in the grade at Nada High School’ — blew up on a 5ch thread. Nada has roughly 220 students per grade, and even those near the bottom sometimes get into Tokyo University or other elite schools, while at a hensachi-45-ish school even the #1 student can barely manage to get into any university at all — so posters split over whether the in-school rankings of the two schools can even be compared directly. Some posts backed up their points with actual screenshots of university placement results.
What people said
There's only about 220 kids per grade, so that level's impossible
Hori Daisuke got an A-rank prediction for Tokyo University back when he was still in high school
There he goes again with one of his usual lies
So then, which university did he actually graduate from?
There's a video on Wakatte TV explaining what Nada is really like, go watch it
A Wakatte TV viewer… lol
Since he had the potential to get into Nada in the first place, sure, someone who once ranked 200th might buckle down and get into Todai — but the average bottom 10% at Nada tops out at Waseda/Keio at best
He went to an open campus day, saw some Todai students goofing off by the Red Gate (Akamon), and gave up on going there
It's not like he even got to sit in on a lab or anything —
what's he supposed to learn just from looking at the Red Gate?
Ah, so this is what they call 'sour grapes'
Correct answer: neither of them could get into Nada even if they retook the high school entrance exam for that same grade
so while it's not exactly impossible for a Nada dropout to match that, I feel like the latter usually ends up ahead
Even a Nada dropout should still be around 65
there could be some genius who, for whatever reason, could only commute to the high school nearest home
Sounds like you'd get everything from guys who make it into Todai to guys who can't even get into MARCH
Even at elite prep schools, the bottom group is shaky on that front too
Hensachi 45 is basically the bottom of the region, or maybe one notch up
at that level, just getting into any university at all is doing well
My school was hensachi 55, and the top student in the 'national university track' class only made it into a low-tier regional national university
I'd rather be me right now than live getting talked about behind my back like that
His taxes go up this year, so he might even get hit with advance tax payments for next year, and when you think about how slim his odds are of keeping this up past next year, that's a total loss
Nah, it won't
Hensachi 45 is basically a monkey enclosure (rock-bottom chaos)
with the top student landing around Nikko-Koma level (Nihon University/Komazawa University, mid-tier privates), something like that
the second-to-last guy got into MARCH straight out of high school
Impressive that even dead last still got into university
at my school there were like 5 people who couldn't even graduate high school
we were near the bottom so I know that world well
Yeah, that pretty much tracks with hensachi 45
Top student got into Doshisha, huh
if you're in Nada's bottom tier, yeah, there probably are some who only get into Doshisha
though normally at Nada you'd take a ronin year and aim for Kyoto University instead
there's a YouTuber called Natsumeat who took 4 ronin years just to get into Tokyo Metropolitan University
and that's even with him properly attending cram school
But there was a guy who went straight from high school into a non-medical program at Okayama University,
and a few years later, just from seriously grinding exam prep again, he was pulling an A-rank prediction for Todai's Rika III (Japan's hardest med program)
the engine under the hood is just different
there's a small subset of kids whose brains mature early, and it really looks like their intelligence just stops developing around age 12
even at 18, getting into Tsukukoma's junior high is harder than getting into Senshu University
Or honestly, at integrated middle-high schools it's a common story: kids who came up through the middle-school track, with no high-school entrance exam pressure, goof off, fall behind, and become dropouts
it's not some grand story about intelligence stopping
Even assuming he gained zero knowledge over those six years,
if he actually had confidence in his raw intelligence
he wouldn't even bother applying to Nikko-Koma in the first place
he'd take a year as a ronin and go for Waseda/Keio instead
That type probably just doesn't share the whole 'study hard, get into a good company' value system in the first place
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Hensachi measures relative standing within the group that took the same mock exam, so the same score can represent very different absolute ability levels depending on how strong that group is overall. Because Nada Junior/Senior High School draws from Japan’s top academic tier right from the middle-school entrance exam, students who rank low within the school often still place well above average by other schools’ standards — and the thread split along that line, with some arguing ‘even Nada’s bottom ranks are Waseda/Keio level’ and others countering ‘there are still students at Nada who genuinely struggle with university entrance exams.’ By contrast, at a hensachi-45 school the exam-taking pool itself isn’t particularly strong, so even the #1 student in the grade sometimes ends up only reaching Nikko-Koma-tier universities — a point posters backed up with actual screenshots of admissions results. There’s no official data confirming Hori Daisuke’s original remark itself; this is all anecdote- and hearsay-based debate on 5ch, and it’s worth remembering that what’s said here about any individual school is only at the level of individual posters’ personal experience.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Daisuke Hori: ‘Topping a hensachi-45 high school class is about the same as ranking 200th at Nada’.”
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