<p>So my high school (private school; ~100 kids in the grade) doesn't rank, and I think it's a pretty good thing. If they did, I know kids would get super-competitive about ranking and who's higher than who and whatnot. No valedictorian. I'm thinking this is a good thinking. We're divided into quintiles (5 sections, 20% each), so we get a rough idea of where we stand, but the school does not publish this data- it's all internal (my school doesn't even publish GPA, apparently; just transcripts).</p>
<p>Does anyone else go to a school that doesn't rank? If you do, do you like the fact that it doesn't rank, or do you wish it did? Or if your school does rank (most schools?), do you like rankings, or do you wish they'd abolish it?</p>
<p>I actually really dislike rankings. You'd think that everyone would be happy with getting all As or something right? But no, because of our stupid grading scale (for reg, goes up .5 for honors/preib/preap and .5 more for ap/ib) 4.0 is a 97-100, 3.7 is 93-96, etc., so people basically get really freaked out about grades. Also, we have 990+ people in our class and despite the fact that probably half couldn't care less they got straight Cs, we have like about 300 really competitive people.</p>
<p>And it just sucks more when people get really depressed about their ranks and beat themselves up about it. Last year, my friend got almost all 96s and was so mad at himself and it's like, what can you do?</p>
<p>Oh! and the whole school gets rank-obsessed for about a whole week- I kid you not, you will see gatherings of people and you'll be like, lol they're pretty animated what's going on and then it'll be this fierce discussion about GPA or something... sad.</p>
<p>Our school ranks, but doesn't publicize the ranks. I'm not sure if that's how every school works, but this way it at least makes it a bit less cut-throat.</p>
<p>Apparently my school ranked but I didn't find out about it until after I was out of school, so I never did know my rank. According to my boyfriend it's like tucked away on the site you can go to to see your grades. So you wouldn't really know your rank unless you knew where to find it. No one gives it out, and they certainly aren't posted anywhere - the only way someone would know your rank is if you told them.</p>
<p>My school doesn't rank, but I think we have a Val and Sal every year, so they must do it partially for that.</p>
<p>All of the higher up kids are confident that they'll get in wherever they want to go, so there's really no competition between them, and I don't think that there would be if ranking was introduced.</p>
<p>we don't rank - probably a good thing because I'm pretty sure we would have like twenty people with the #1 rank. our vals every year are the people with an unweighted 4.0.</p>
<p>I go to a school that doesn't rank and I'm really glad. We still have a valedictorian though, but I don't know how he/she gets chosen. It is competitive enough already at my school and a lot of kids (including me) would be so stressed out if we worked really hard and still didn't get ranked at the very top.</p>
<p>We don't rank or weight, and that's good. Our school does put a lot of pressure on kids to take hard classes and do well in them, but I'm glad that it's removed the meaningless competition among students for those spots. It does still recognize top students in the form of various awards (which are based on volunteer and extracurricular commitment as well as grades) and sure, you get a sense of who the academic achievers are, but in my school, where you need a 3.98 to be in the top 10%, determining rank among those kids would be going down to tiny little points and it would put too much focus on grades and not enough on challenging yourself in education...the smartest kids in my grade aren't always the ones with the highest GPAs because they not only take hard courses to challenge themselves, they're involved in a lot of clubs or sports. If we ranked, too many kids would take easier classes and drop their clubs to focus on grades...if we weighted AP courses, too many kids would drop art and music and other electives like Communications and Sociology to take those. Ew.
And since we don't have a val or sal, student speakers for graduation are elected by the senior class.</p>
<p>I'm not really sure how I feel about my school. We rank, which is good in a sense because it's humungous. It's nice to know that straight-A kids in ridiculously easy standard classes aren't getting the same rank as kids pulling the same grades in AP or IB classes. However, I'm in IB, and I think they should give you one class a year that doesn't affect your rank, because classes that relate to my interests (debate, creative writing, newspaper, etc...) are standard level. Also, because some of my classes are semester long and some are year long, I had to take a semester class because of scheduling, which meant it had to be standard level. I don't think it's fair to penalize high-achieving kids for scheduling conflicts or because electives are unweighted.</p>
<p><em>sigh</em> I suppose every ranking system has its flaws.</p>