<p>An article from the Concord Monitor in NH</p>
<p>*Officials at such high schools worry that a poor ranking may unfairly hurt a student's chance at college. Sometimes students are separated in class rankings by just a few hundredths of a point - a gap magnified perhaps unfairly by the ranking. In other words, in a small class of high achievers, a mediocre rank may mask a teen's true talent. *</p>
<p>Concord</a> Monitor - Getting rid of class rankings a good idea</p>
<p>S1's fairly small school (+/- 100 per graduating class) neither ranks nor weights any classes anymore. They feel it's fairer all around, and that the lack of weighting in particular is helping to mitigate some of the hand-wringing over course choices. The school profile is very explicit about this, and about what courses are available, which ones are seriously challenging despite not having an AP label, what the top GPA of last graduating class has been, and so on.</p>
<p>As he finishes his junior year and heads into his senior year, I'm inclined to agree. The kids are stressed, of course, but it's a very different picture from the one we saw unfold at D's larger, public h.s., where weights and ranks came down to hundredths of a point, just as the article says.</p>
<p>While its easy to focus on those rankings seem to hurt, I think people magnify the importance of small differences due to a few hundredths of a point. I don't think colleges care so much about whether your 3rd or 5th or 17th in your class as compared to your overall standing (top 10%, etc).</p>
<p>What articles like the one linked earlier don't talk about is those HURT by abolishing rankings. I'm talking about the effect on kids who don't test particularly well. It isn't as when rankings are abolished colleges are just going to admit at random; they're still going to try to figure out how good a student someone is, they'll just have less information with which to do so. So now the main way to compare kids between schools is going to be a 3-hour SAT test. If you test well that's probably good news; but the diligent student who doesn't answer SAT questions well but has a great record relative to her peers in HS is going to get slammed.</p>
<p>GPA's are not a great indicator when comparing kids from different schools; some schools have grade inflation and everyone is above-average, some are stringent. It's class ranking along with the transcript that can help separate things out. If Joe has a 3.6 from his school and Sally has a 3.5, who is a better student if they've taken similar classes? You'd make a better guess if you knew Sally was ranked in the top 5% but Joe was only in the top 15%.</p>
<p>Abolishing rankings entirely is throwing out the baby with the bath water. As the saying goes, mend it but don't end it. Giving rankings in groups (top 5%, top 10%, etc) would get rid of the hair-splitting differences over hundredths of a point while still preserving useful information.</p>
<p>For MY high school, it was a great idea to abolish class rank.</p>
<p>We were a school composed of five magnets - math/science/tech, a general academic magnet, visual arts, communications & media, and performing arts. At least one quarter (sometimes more) of every student's time, other than the ones in the general academic magnet, was spent in magnet-specific classes. Ranking was just silly - people's curricula were way too different. I suppose they could have ranked by magnet, but that would have been more trouble than it was worth...and still led to the problem of encouraging kids to take the easy class for the high grade, which was part of what they were trying to alleviate by ditching class rank.</p>
<p>At D's school, rankings were done the 2nd week in September. The 2 kids who were ranked #1 just could not perform in senior-year classes; the val and sal no longer are 4.0 uw students but are still the val and sal. Meanwhile, D just missed top 10% when she applied ED to JHU (got in anyway); if the high school would rerank today, other kids would be val and sal, and D would be in top 6%. I tell her ignore it; she got in to JHU and the val was waitlisted everywhere (apparently that gal applied to no safeties but only to HYPS), but I can tell she hurts inside. Especially when the val (who is in AP English with D) has to have a word a day defined for her: empathetic, prey (I'm not making this stuff up!).
My opinion: rank later in senior year. Kids in my town want it; may be too late for college apps so GPA will count more for that.</p>
<p>Ranks should be included as well as additional information. It will be hard for admissions but the more data that is available of the student, the better choice that can be made. </p>
<p>And I am sure that every admissions committee knows about the magnets and top HS like Stuy/TJ/Andover/etc.</p>
<p>lfecollegeguy: haven't you just read what five other posters have said? Their respective schools didn't drop ranking arbitrarily. Why do you think they did that? To cause headaches for adcoms? </p>
<p>I attended a very competitive HS which ranked but this was not widely disseminated amongst the students (if at all). I THINK I was 10th or 12th or something like that. I never worried about it and neither did that group of top performing students. We loved learning though -- and that group was a fantastic experience. Several of us eventually matriculated at Ivies while others got full rides at U-Mich and other state schools.</p>
<p>Mikemac,
I think the problem with your example is this: If Sally and Mike are in the same school, sometimes the difference between 3.5 and 3.6 or even 4.2 and 4.3 is the difference between being in the top 10% , 20% etc. I've seen something similar in small schools where each rank may be separated by thousandths of a point. In a class of 80-100 that may mean graduating in the top 20% of your class even though you may have higher than a 4.0 and be .2 or so less than the val. If Sally has a 3.5 and is top 10% and Mike has a 3.6 and is top 20%, and they are at the same school, is Sally really a significantly better student? I think that's why some schools are getting rid of ranking.</p>
<p>Rankings do provide valuable information to colleges, but they do need to be accompanied by data from the school (how many kids, the GPA distribution for top 10%, top 20%, etc) so the colleges have the opportunity to gauge those 1/100's of a point. They know that the kid who's top 20% but a few points behind 10% is a better student than the barely top 20% kid. Colleges need <em>more</em> information regarding rank, not less, so that they can make the most informed decision. </p>
<p>Of course, some rankings are more a question of who can game the system, but you may be surprised to note that adcoms went to high school. They, too, know that the teacher's pet isn't always the brightest in the school--that's why <em>cough</em> a school of a certain crimson pride is so proud of rejecting X number of valedictorian applicants. Rankings aren't the be-all-and-end-all. They're a reference point, so that your kids hard work at a decent school compares to your neighbors at the easy-peasy local school.</p>
<p>Yes, rankings play a role in college admissions, but school's shouldn't hide them simply because they don't want to hinder students' chances. The smaller the school or more competitive the school, the bigger "chunks" of rank there can be. At the most difficult schools (like NCSSM, Andover, other magnets...), anyone in the top quartile is a pretty solid student. In other schools, the difference between top 2% and top 5% can be significant in the types of students they embody, because some schools are easy to "skate" through.</p>
<p>Rankings do offer colleges a way to gauge how a student can rise to the challenge--which is why they may accept a top 5% kid from a bad public as opposed to the 20% from a prestigious boarding school, even if they are probably intellectually comparable. Hair-splitting differences (quite frankly) su.ck, but the problem is then is grade inflation and not ranking. Rankings allow colleges to see how that crazy high GPA compares to that of one's peers, and if it's average for the school, then they know to take that kid's GPA with a grain of salt. Rankings provide a point of reference to make every kid's achievements comparable.</p>
<p>Here is another article I found about this topic that was posted today. Check out the chart on the right that ranks class rank among other factors.
Interesting...</p>
<p>so based on all of this, the best scenario is to go to a high school that permits anyone into AP courses, has grade inflation and doesn't rank.........</p>
<p>Hmmmm, now if only we could go back in time......</p>
<p>well it really depends; if you're doing well and ranked high then no it wouldnt be good but vice versa it would be.</p>
<p>I'm not following what you're trying to say, rodney. If it's sarcasm, I'm not getting what it's meant to poke at. If you're trying to say it would be nice if all of our kids felt they could choose high school courses without an eye to what, besides an education, it would "get" them, I'm all for that.</p>
<p>glassesarechic, sure, a really well considered, intelligently structured ranking system is truly helpful to college admissions staff. But there are ways of providing the same information, without fostering/encouraging grade-grubbing, course-selection gaming, and bitter, ugly competition for "top" spots. A good profile plus an honest report from a GC can show a college very precisely where a given student stands, vis a vis his or her classmates. </p>
<p>And the sort of ranking system that results in schools having ten or twelve valedictorians is arguably less helpful than no rank at all. </p>
<p>It's hard to make the no-ranking system work well at a big school with insufficient guidance staff, and I don't see much of a way around that. </p>
<p>And big schools with their eyes on the (extremely dubious) "prize" of a "top 100" Newsweek ranking are going to keep dangling those weighted grades in front of students, packing them into AP courses that provide less and less to their students in the way of enriched, advanced, interesting material. And so on.</p>
<p>Val and sal are lovely traditions, and can bring genuine honor and well deserved pride to kids who've earned them . . . if they've earned them for the right reasons. But I'm well aware that my "right reasons" and other people's aren't necessarily going to be the same. Plenty of people are happy to have their kid named one of twenty "valedictorians" thanks to some academic gifts, plus their stellar work in GPA gaming. </p>
<p>To put things in perspective, no, I'm not a bitter parent whose child was denied a top spot. I was awed and proud and grateful to see my oldest speak at her graduation. But I will enjoy my next child's graduation, with a speaker chosen by the kids, and exact class rank known to none, a great deal more.</p>
<p>I don't mean to sound harsh or inflexible. I know there are schools where traditional ranking is done and it works just fine. But having seen it both ways, I'm very much in favor of schools finding different ways to show where their students stand.</p>
<p>Hi Harriet....yea, A little bit of sarcasm, a little bit of the latter in terms of your explanation......Class rank ,IMO, really stinks on both sides of the fence....</p>
<p>From our experience this year, unweighted GPA trumped class rank in most, if not all admissions cases; meaning the grade deflation around here was not compensated for with class rank.....Alot of the colleges probably didn't take the time to examine any of it, just the UW GPA......and I'm not just talking about top 20 schools....
I'm not sure how to "advise" the kids coming up in the system when only the top 5% of the students (15 kids) have "acceptable" unweighted GPA's in CC world.......Everyone else has their decent spattering of B's and B+'s in honors and AP's and in a medium-competitive public; that doesn't work in college admissions when all of the other schools around our county do not rank AND have many, many kids with high UW GPA's.....</p>
<p>Sorry for the long post, but in terms of the original question, if you have a truly uninflated GPA, class rank will not make up for it unless your school is private or a well-known public.....(or if you are Val or Sal)....</p>
<p>My kids' high school has an outstanding track record for getting kids into highly selective schools, and the school does not rank. I think that helps.</p>
<p>I think so. Our hs ranks but does not weight anything which enourages and rewards kids for taking easier classes. How absurd is it when the student identified as the "top student" in the class has not taken any AP math or science classes in contrast to many classmates?</p>