<p>As a student at a competitive high school, I find ranking unnecessary. In fact, our school doesn’t send rank unless requested. There are a lot of problems with ranking, mostly with weighted GPAs. Our school used to count honors 5.0, AP/IB 6.0 and now honors 4.5 AP/IB 5.0 Those who took classes with the old weightings have inflated GPAs, and junior year transfers doing the IB program and IB diploma kids in general can get an artificially high GPA. The 1# in my grade is a transfer and the next two have a 5.0 honors class. It’s not fair to place them so high. IMO, ranking is flawed, but there also aren’t other statistics that can replace it.</p>
<p>Class rank is only useful relative to the strength of its high school.</p>
<p>Class rank pretty much teaches students not to work hard, but take easy classes to get ahead.</p>
<p>Class rank is completely bogus. Attending a prestigious private school where 90% of the kids value their education is completely different than attending a public school where as little as 10% might value their education. Class rank should have absolutely no meaning in college admissions.</p>
<p>I feel that class rank is not a valuable tool for admissions officers. I take many college level and AP classes, and get good grades in those classes, yet a friend who has taken only one AP class is about 40 places higher than me. Many students at my school try to get good grades, more than average I’d say. For some perspective, I am barely in the top 20% in my school, yet I’ve gotten only three B’s during all my high school years and got 2200 on my SAT. So I don’t feel that my class rank demonstrates the kind of student I am. I think college admissions staff can get all the information they need from the rest of my transcript.</p>
<p>There don’t seem to be many people here who actively support class rank. I wonder why so many schools continue to use it?</p>
<p>Adcoms use rank as one of the few tools to fight grade inflation. It is amazing how often posts here on cc have students list 3.6 GPA and are in the middle of their class.</p>
<p>In Kentucky the State Legislature started a program for giving scholarship money for students who attend in-state schools based on their GPA. Higher grades means more money for students and more pressure on teachers. Since the program started fifteen years ago, the average GPA in the state has increased from 2.8 to 3.3. </p>
<p>The same idea works in all competitive high schools except that the reward is more competitive applications instead of dollars. Simple economics - people respond to incentives unless disincentives are used to counterbalance.</p>
<p>That’s not necessarily a fault of lower emphasis on, or elimination of, class rank. IMO, Kentucky’s State Legislature should consider other factors, such as standardized tests.</p>
<p>@emberjed:
Standardized tests tend to measure only the intellect of a student, and the main intention of grade-based scholarships are to motivate students to work harder, which means this will not work with test scores. Though kids at CC do not support ranking because many of them attend college prep or magnet schools filled with overachievers, which means that their rank would be a lot higher than if they attended a typical run-of-the-mill public school.</p>
<p>And I certainly see the point with class rank. At a nearby public university, the student body’s average composite SAT is a little less than 1800, which should be in the 80%tile, and their average class rank is around the 85%tile to the 90% percentile. Their average GPA? A 4.4 weighted/3.75 unweighted. Which indicates that several schools around my state may be artificially inflating their students’ grades. The problem here is that with more and more schools straying away from ranking, and how the SAT is becoming more and more devalued, GPA may end up becoming the most important factor in admissions, which will likely green-light grade inflation and the decay of academic standards across the nation.</p>
<p>I hate class rank! I do believe that the practice should be abolished because it can very easily be biased or skewed. My school, for example refuses to weight any of my advanced (not AP) classes that I had taken at my previous school prior to transfer. Oftentimes, these classes were more difficult than the weighted equivalent at my new school. Also, my school abuses the class-ranking system to encourage better stats and increase funding. AP classes are weighted, whereas concurrent college classes aren’t. Also, because many students are encouraged to take difficult classes, the teachers are pressured by parents and administration to give out higher grades to make the school and students look better. Eliminating class rank wouldn’t solve every issue with the education system, but it certainly could help!</p>
<p>My school doesn’t weight classes… AP classes are weighed the same as a regular class (think ‘Criminal Justice’ or even band… automatic 100’s at my school). So the third in my class has a 120% in strength and conditioning while I take all AP and advanced classes. Yay.</p>
<p>I think the class rank system is a less accurate yet easily executed system with the same conceptual goal as the scattergrams proposed at the beginning of this thread… However that kind of system is complicated to report, costly to apply and adopt, and more paperwork on both the ends of high schools and colleges alike. </p>
<p>My school is a bit peculiar about class rank though, since we have specialized learning centers where students can apply and take accelerated or select curriculum specifically tailored to the basis of that learning center. I’m in the Medical Sciences Learning Center which of course is centered around science. As one of the more competitive learning centers (though I would argue most of MedSci’s target applicants are now going to HighTech and BioTech), we are taken out of the ranking system for the others in the high school. In other words, if a student from MedSci is valedictorian, then technically, our school reports 2 valedictorians to colleges when sending out transcripts. </p>
<p>I don’t exactly agree with it especially since Computer Sciences stays within the rank (even though they usually place top 30) and everyone counts for our rank… It’s not exactly fair but thats the way it is…</p>
<p>I’ve never been a huge fan of class rank. At my school, there are kids who take the easiest AP classes at the school and a bunch of bogus honors weighted electives and end up with higher GPA’s and class ranks then kids taking more rigorous courses and making the occasional B as a result. It’s too subjective.</p>