I’m amazed at the amount of information you have about the student body at your children’s school. To know who is ranked in these spots, what their course rigor is, and now what their school acceptances are? I venture a guess that that this level of invasive information-gathering belies a more cut-throat school culture than what you’ve described.
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This seems likely. i think the current trend is very much towards getting rid of class rank, so this may just be to keep in line with what are currently considered best practices in high school educational environment.
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I do get where you are coming from. My kids were #1 & #3 in their classes. And when I read news reports of the elimination of rank going away, my initial reaction was like yours. Of course, nobody in our HS goes to ivy leagues. A couple to other top ranked. And then the state flagship. I estimate only 40 kids (out of a freshman class of 400-500 and senior graduate class of 200-300) go to a 4 year university
But I don’t see the reason being as much as stress and mental health, as much as in the amazing high schools so many of the kids are amazing. It’s like splitting hairs which one is “better.”
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OP, so if I were in your shoes, I would be upset. If your kid is ranked #1 (or #2, or top 2-3%, or whatever), it’s going to help almost anywhere. So if your kid was ranked at that level yesterday, and today the school decides, hey, no more rankings, it’s not a positive for your kid, no matter the esoteric arguments for or against ranking in general.
Might make sense to speak with your guidance office and see if the counselor would be able to mention/emphasize in their common app letter where your kid stands?
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Reminder that CC is supposed to be a friendly and welcoming place. People can disagree, but keep it polite and remember - no politics and no debate.
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Top 6%, 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% may be thresholds for automatic admission (sometimes in combination with test scores) at various Texas public universities, but specific rank can still matter between automatic admits applying to competitive majors at the more selective Texas public universities (e.g. CS at UT Austin).
However, most other colleges and universities do not have as much emphasis on class rank compared to Texas public universities.
I am pretty sure high school counselors do that and it is part of what the colleges already ask for. For my S21, the student who everyone would have agreed would have been ranked #1 got accepted to Harvard. For my S23, it’s Brown.
The question really isn’t, did your kid pull off .02 more points on a somewhat arbitrary scale than his closest peer, but rather, how did this student perform given the academic options they had? And is it really better to take yet another AP class just for the sake of boosting that GPA rather than taking a class that suits their interest and skills but is not offered at the AP level?
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I also would look at this this way: your sons know, even without the rankings, that they are the top tier at their schools. No one would take that away from them. Also, how much not ranked No. 1 would hurt them, especially if their school counselor can attest that they are definitely the top ranked/performing students at the school.
I don’t think it will matter for college AO whether they are ranked 1, 2 or 10, or 15 as long as they show the GPA, rigor, stats and ECs.
A student I know had to move state. He is an excellent student with great stats and excellent ECs. Even before transferring, he met the principal of his new HS who kept on saying “wow, your activities are impressive” while in reality, he is no different from high-performing students at the school - so there are about 20-25 kids in the group who are taking dual enrollment, AP classes, excellent ECs.
Unfortunately, when the ranking at the new school was announced, he wasn’t in the top ranking because the school actually assigned weight on the grades. So if the "A’ is 95, then it’s weighted differently from if the “A” is 98 or 99. Since he came from another school from another state, the school decided that his As were worth 95.
Does it make him less high performing than the others? I think a lot of us would say no.
Another thing folks should remember…there are a number of colleges…and some top ones…that clearly state they do not use class rank at all in their admissions decisions.
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Something to note: even if the high school is doing away with class rank, The Common Application school report form that counselors fill in asks the counselor to rank the student among the following options in “academic achievements”, “extracurricular accomplishments”, “personal qualities and character”, and “overall”:
- no basis
- below average
- average
- good (above average)
- very good (well above average)
- excellent (top 10%)
- outstanding (top 5%)
- one of the top few encountered in my career
In other words, colleges using The Common Application with school report from the counselor are getting a (somewhat subjective) class rank range for each applicant, regardless of whether the high school publishes a numerical class rank for each student. This means that the absence of numerical class rank from the high school is unlikely to matter much in admissions to highly selective colleges that use holistic admission reading (as opposed to those which plug the numerical class rank into a formula or compare it to a threshold for admission or scholarships), unless the counselors also decide to refuse to fill in that section of the school report form.
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Only one team can win a football game.
100% of school kids can win in life.
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That’s a lovely sentiment! But I think in the OP’s case the “winning” refers to a spot in one of our nation’s hyper-selective colleges (correct me if I’m wrong, I have not read the whole thread). The number of students that “win” this spot for predominantly academic reasons (vs. athletic reasons etc.) are usually at the very top of their class and the spots are few.
To the OP, even though I don’t know enough about class rank and am lukewarm about the idea, I would think that the onus of supplying the information of top scholarship to the universities will inevitably fall on your kid. Or hopefully their counselor at school can incorporate it in their recommendation. So the dropping of class rank could either be neutral or negative. I can’t see how it might be positive for your kid in specific (I’m not going to muse about how it might impact other kids).
And there are statistics someplace that also say that these colleges also do NOT accept all the valedictorians who apply.
It’s actually like when the NFL changes the rules. Only difference is if you are an NFL team you have no choice but to play by the new rules.
In your case you point out you are a paying customer. If you don’t like the kids schools rules pull them out and send them elsewhere where they class rank.
One old fashioned approach would be deal with it. Hope this helps.
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No idea how the OP’s school operates. And to be honest I’m not sure how the whole valedictorian, salutatorian etc. works. Some schools have many of them, some schools few. So I don’t know.
That’s how I would describe our school as well.
So, it wasn’t a matter of the top students maliciously competing against each other, the school’s concern/experience was students competing with themselves for 100ths of an average just to happen upon the coveted #1 spot. Those are already high-achieving students who take rigorous courses and work crazy nighttime hours to write outstanding papers and prep for upcoming exams.
By eliminating Val/Sal, and only rank on a decile level, the unhealthy chasing of accidental decimal points stopped, high achievers continued to work hard because it’s their nature - but they also were at liberty to choose an interesting course/activity without having to be strategic about the #1 spot.
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@teleia i meant that there are plenty of colleges that also don’t use class rank…and can’t accept all the valedictorians who apply.
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But the point is to de emphasize you can only be a success if you go to Harvard. It’s flat out not true. But the rank is made to show that only the wealthy win which is a reality of society.
A school like Texas, fails IMHO using rank as the primary factor. A kid in the top 6% is in. Yet all schools aren’t created equal. So a kid at a low performing school may not be equipped to handle the school Vs maybe the 30th or 50th percentile at another school but they’d never sniff UT.
Then how bout the kid who becomes a mechanic. Or plumber. May be the most successful in their class.
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Harvard doesn’t use class rank when reviewing admissions applications.
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