That’s a fair point. And, I like the avatar you selected!
I just know it certainly helped to get him into a Top 5 school… it says it right on the admissions report as such… valedictorian… go right to next bin… accepted.
I’m okay eliminating CR provided ALL UNIVERSITIES stop using it… and that’s not the case. I have two official reports (one can ask for them) sent back that show EA accepted owing to be CR#1.
Actually, at least some Texas private universities routinely waive tuition for valedictorians who are in-state
If Class Rank doesn’t matter, why calculate GPA/QPA?
If GPA/QPA do not matter, then why even give a grade for any course?
Let’s assume a student is competing against a professor to get a certain grade in a course. Let’s assume that competition is curved and the top 5% of the class gets the certain grade. Would not all of the logic applied to CR not apply to a class of 500 students attempting to get a certain grade?
That seems stressful. Stop giving grades then for that class. And so on and so forth.
BINGO!
Until all universities STOP rewarding being valedictorian, then it hurts those that would have had a CR#1 at time of application at least. Yes, they could lose it between November and May.
And, if one is already in a very tough demographic, it would seem any edge possible to get into a university, waive tuition, etc. … seems to penalize the one kid who took the hardest courses, did the work, was multidimensional, with community service, and so on.
Which college and where is this admissions report?
Some schools have auto admission policies based on class rank, but these aren’t typically the most selective institutions. If your kids are top performers, they would be expected to be admitted to this sort of school with or without class rank.
I sympathize with what you are saying. But let me offer a slightly different perspective. My son has friends from Stuyvesant who told him that the school offers a miserable experience because it computes a gpa to 2 or 3 decimals and ranks on the basis of the gpa.
My son told me that in every class where there were no grades or grades not on the curve, he learned more. Indeed for some classes in college the profs don’t want to give grades, but the university insists that they do. Many classes are graded on an A-D-F scale, and kids feel liberated to go and learn. Many get As. They put in serious effort into the class.
The kid was never a valediction anywhere. It didn’t affect anything.
Lots of colleges look at grades and/or GPA instead of rank.
College admissions seem to have changed so much even in the last few years.
I understand your fear. You can petition your school but I see both sides. And taking away class rank helps more than it “hurts.”
One of the issues with class rank is that people consider it strictly ordinal. 1>2>3…. In reality, if you know the students, everyone may know that 5>>1.
unless you were the one slated to be #1 
Colleges compare applicants against other students at the same school. There are ways to do that without class rank. They will still receive the transcripts, and can assess the rigor, GPA, etc from there. I would not be concerned about this, personally.
I would even go to the extent of saying that being thought of as a “grade grabber” was thought to be negative for college admissions. The advice is that if you got a 1580 on the SAT don’t go and take it again, because you are signaling to the college that you are not in here to study, but are wasting time on irrelevant things. Some imperfection is good. It means you didn’t play safe. You really took risk. Of course you needed to have taken risk and it needs to show on your transcript in terms of courses taken, and your extracurricular load etc. and teachers need to write that you take serious academic risk, and don’t care about grades. The Val at our school is often concerned where the next two or three kids in the school are applying to, and if he is competing with them head on in EA. Val’s often take less risk. They know it.
Apples and oranges. Weighted and unweighted grades can provide a substantial (maybe not complete) picture of rigor and performance. Rankings don’t, for all the reasons I mentioned above. Perhaps this is why a lot of high schools are moving away from ranking.
“Competing against a professor”? I don’t even know what that means. We are talking about high school students, after all. Also, I’m a professor, and neither I nor anyone I know grades like that(or competes with our students – again, huh?). I’ve never been graded in that, and I spent a lot of years in school. Maybe that happens in STEM weed-out courses. I have no idea. But as I said, we’re talking about high school students, not college students, so that part of your argument is not really relevant here…
that’s for sure!
theory vs practice
Agree that it will have no impact. Our competitive public HS does not rank and it is no issue – plenty of kids get into the top schools.
College admissions officers will see the applicant’s transcript and will know exactly what classes they took as well as the grade.
This is the norm. The overwhelming majority of selective, private high schools do not rank students. The main exceptions occur in states where class rank is important for state flagship admission. This results in the overwhelming majority of students who are admitted to “elite” private colleges not submitting rank. At some “elite” colleges, fewer than 20% of admitted students submit rank.
There is some truth to the rational you listed. At a selective private HS, ranking students generally hurts a larger portion of students than it helps, particularly if the HS has grade inflation with a good portion of students having A averages. It’s not just limited to students with near #1 rank. For example, suppose the #17 kid you mentioned has a 3.95 UW GPA. It sounds better to have a 3.95 UW GPA in isolation than to be ranked 17th out of 100 at a variety of colleges.
Highly selective private colleges are probably more likely to spend time reviewing the class profile, which gives them a good idea of how the student generally ranks in class. The may not know the exact position, but they know that lots of kids have 3.95+ UW, so a 3.95 probably doesn’t correspond to near valedictorian. And this often does not eliminate them from potential admission. A near straight A kid may be admitted to Harvard, even if he is not top 10% of class at a private HS. Harvard’s CDS says that they do not consider rank when submitted.
This doesn’t mean the #1 ranking is a key factor with the admission offers. When rank is submitted, rank is often considered; but it is one of numerous other factors that are also considered, rather than an auto admit at selective private colleges. I doubt that typical colleges are focused on small differences in ranking, based on whatever goofy internal weights that particular HS uses. For example, they might favor the 4,0 UW kid chooses band over the 15th AP class, even if taking a non honors/AP class like band means they have no possibility of being valedictorian. I’d expect the more common approach is see that the transcript shows top grades in key, rigorous courses; combined with reviewing HS profile to get a general idea of grading structure/distribution.
No one said grades don’t matter. What doesn’t matter is a tiny difference among students, or ranking students whose rigor didn’t match.
You may believe that the valedictorian tag got your son into a top college. Admissions officers, college counselors, enrollment experts…and the thousands of valedictorians who are denied their top choices each year…would disagree.
Your son was accepted because of his academic achievements, rigor, and demonstrations of passion and potential. The fact that he did very well mattered, but being first in his class absolutely didn’t get him automatically bumped into a particular basket in the admissions office.
Admissions officers at most schools, and probably every highly selective university, recalculate GPA because scales are so arbitrary.
How does it hurt that person? It will still be evident through the school profile and through that student’s grades vs any other applicants from the school that the student is at the top of the class. The grades and rigor are still available, and the relative performance is easily extrapolated by AOs.
In addition to not being very informative for admissions purposes, I imagine that class rank creates real headaches for high school administration and for teachers; pressure to change grades etc because of students and parents who are concerned about rank. And why foster unnecessary competition between and stress among students? Kids are under enough pressure these days. Given that so many schools are doing away with this and it no longer seems to be the norm or expected, I can’t really imagine what motivation a school would have to keep this system around.