What does "percentile' mean in this recommendation portal? I am a final year student and applying to graduate schools in the USA for Fall 2016. Recently, a professor was filling out my recommendation section in a college's admission portal. 

In that portal, there was a question asking to rate the student in terms of intellect, communication ability, and such other things based on 'percentile' in class. The options were 1%, 5%, 10% and 50%. My teacher selected 50% as a higher percentile means better ranking in class. My current class ranking is 2/60 and I am worried about it. Did my teacher do the correct thing or should she have chosen the first option(1%)?

Edit (15 Nov 2018): Well this question is almost 3 years old now. Got a notification from this recently so wanted to thank all the people who answered back then. I did ask my teacher to send the correct data and consequently got in one of the Ivy Leagues in the fall of 2016. So good, baby baby..
Lower is definitely better. For example, the "Common Application" which is used for applying to undergraduate schools is pretty clear that 1% is good.



The same generally holds for graduate school applications.

You should ask the recommender to try to change it and, if she is unable, she should contact the admissions committee directly. A top 50 percent ranking will almost surely lead to you not being accepted.

If your reference writer is so unfamiliar with the US system, you may want to consider asking someone else. There is an art to writing good recommendation letters. For example, it is reasonable for a recommender to rate the "intellect", "communication ability", etc. as being top 1% even if the student is ranked 2/60 since there is a difference between class rank and "intellect", "communication ability", etc. In fact, differentiating between the two is the whole point of the recommendation letter.

If the recommender is unable to change the letter at this point, it is much better to put in a phone call/email to the chair of graduate admissions than a phone call/letter to the university. In my experience the central administration is useless and you need to get to whoever is actually looking at the applications. It is critical that the recommender, and not the applicant, makes this call/email.