<p>The schools do rank. At some point, one of them will get sued for the duplicity of saying that they dont rank when in fact they do.</p>
<p>The result will be to go back to a transparent ranking, which will be better, as kids and parents will know where they stand.</p>
<p>I'd be more interested in seeing the highest scoring kids on the SAT and SAT IIs recognized, especially if restricted to Math, Physics, Chemistry, and possibly some factually based history in there. Could also use the AP's. That takes the local graders off the hook, and is less subject to gaming.</p>
<p>Our school includes students in special services in regular class ranking and
about 25% of the top 10% of the class are students with extreme disabilities.
I can't imagine an adcom figuring that into the equation. I discussed this
with the principal yesterday and he told me that 2 years ago a student was
almost rejected in his Air Force Academy bid until someone from the school intervened and told the Academy that his ranking of 13 would have been 5,
after subtracting special services students. Doesn't this seem really weird?
Are there other schools that do this? As you can imagine we don't get
too many kids into top schools. ( And this doesn' even include the kids who
don't take calculus or AP classes.)</p>
<p>Jmac, it too often happens, especially to students whose schools are not on the radar screens of the colleges where they are applying. It happens routinely at some of the state universities where class rank is very important in the equation but extenuating circumstances are not taken into consideration. I know a young man who really had trouble with a 3.2 average, which put him in the lower half of his class. That rank really bothered some colleges that were really not that selective, but heavily stressed class rank. He was really an excellent candidate for those schools, but comeing from a highschool with inflated grades, that ranked with big clusters top heavy, really hurt him.</p>
<p>My school ended up having 3 vals and 2 sals...I was surprisingly one of the vals after my report card (and the grade report sent to my colleges) had miscalculated my GPA at 5th...the "drama" over this has been intense and extremely dividing in my competitive school.
~The GPAs were so close (weighted) and complicated to calculate (me and another Val had much more credits than any of the others from marching band and sports zero-periods) that they resorted to unweighted GPA = vals ~ 4.0 UW while the sals had one B each. We've all had the same academic classes over the past 4 years so it was the best way....but boy was it a mess!!</p>