<p>Most schools that don’t officially “rank” will confidentially rank for admissions/scholarship consideration.</p>
<p>My high school (small class of 100, private, very rigorous) did not rank. They did provide deciles and then quartiles for the bottom half of the class, but no individual numbers besides val and sal. I think this was the only fair way to do it. Because of the nature of the school, even the bottom of the class works very hard… My 85% weighted average barely put me in the 50-75 range. To individually rank a class in which an 89% weighted average means you’re in the bottom half of the class would be extremely unfair.</p>
<p>I am going to try and summarize what I have read. Some of the reasons for not ranking include:
1-An effort to get adcoms to look at the students transcript content rather than at a number.
2-To decrease competition among students and complaining among school administration and parents.
3-To avoid misrepresenting the differences among students when many students have insignificant GPA differences which could amount to large ranking differences if the school used a ranking system.
4-To minimize the top heavy effects that will occur in a magnet school that draws tops students from surrounding areas.
5-To avoid making some students appear to be weak in schools, such as magnets where all of the students are high achievers and had to be to gain admission to the school.</p>
<p>Have I missed anything? Our district does not have schools that fall into any of these categories. It is a school of about 2.000 students with a general population, some highly motivated students some not. It is not highly competitive and there is generally a lot of comraderie among the students at the top of the class. Most of the college bound population go to Public Texas colleges. By law Texas public high schools must rank the top 10% of students. Can anyone see why there would be an advantange to only ranking those students and not ranking the rest of the class?</p>
<p>My school, a “pure” magnet, doesn’t rank at all–we give GPA distributions, no deciles or quintiles. I wonder how the Academic Index treats a profile stating that 16% of the class had a (weirdly weighted) GPA over 4.0.</p>
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<p>The question is what the difference was between her and #32 GPA-wise. I assume that schools try to break it down by grouping similar levels of achievement and the GPA spread for each group, will therefore be fairly narrow. Call me naive: Given that GPA needs to be considered in the context of course rigor and other factors, I can’t believe whether you are at the top or bottom of your group becomes the deal-breaker.</p>
<p>I agree that #3 sounds a lot better than #32, but at the same time I think ranks can artificially make one student seem much better than another. Is the student with a 102.7 GPA (my son at #8) really so much better or worse than the one with the 100.1 average who would have been many, many places down the line - especially in a large school like ours.</p>
<p>On the other hand, for my younger son, who has close to a B+ average (unweighted) in his academic courses - it surely helps that he is just barely out of the top 5% of the class. His exact rank makes him look pretty good.</p>
<p>Our local HS does not weight grades at all. It also doesn’t rank. It is true that one can look at the profile and get a rough idea of where a kid’s GPA stacks up, but it is only a rough idea, especially since the GPA distribution is always that of last year’s seniors, not the class currently applying. Classes do vary.</p>
<p>Every year they declare a “Top 10”–it seems to be a local newspaper custom–and every year it includes mostly pleaser girls who are solid students but didn’t take the hardest classes. One year the girl who was declared val had never taken a single honors or AP course, although that is unusual.</p>
<p>The kids who probably suffer are those who took honors and AP classes but don’t have an A or A- average. A kid who risks a C in a more challenging class is harshly penalized. While I have no problem with not ranking, I really feel that they ought to weight grades. And I think that they should stop declaring vals and sals unless they weight.</p>
<p>Consolation, I have to admit, I would be livid if a child who had no AP or Honors was picked to be Val. over more challenged students. How crazy is that. Our HS has tossed around the idea of “unweighting” grades. This has not gone over well with the parents. Parents for not weighting suggest that some kids in “academic” algebra work much harder for their A’s than kids in “honors” or AP. While I agree this is true in some instances, I still believe that Honors and AP classes should get some benifit i.e. “weighting”. I have seen the difference in workload between those classes and it seems significant to me. Our HS has given up having a Val/Sal. Instead, kids (anyone is eligible) submit an essay on a topic picked by the administration and they chose a “graduation speaker”. My DD wants nothing to do with it since you must speak on a topic prompt given by the administration.</p>
<p>Consolation: It may be no consolation but I agree with you on the weighting issue. So far we still do weighted classes but there were efforts to change that. Many of us pitched the same arguments you make as possibilities that would happen in our district if the weights were dropped. There is nothing else to be said but it is unfair and it encourages mediocrity and discourages taking a challenge. Its hard to see how this can be viewed as a good idea.</p>
<p>At my sons’ high school, and at some other schools that I know in this area, there are kids who get into the most selective colleges even in the second quintile rank wise. However, there are schools where only the val or sal or other true standout in some desired category ever get into such schools. When I lived in the midwest, that was the case at the very large public high school in our area. Most everyone went to the local colleges, Big State U, or the smaller former teacher’s colleges. Very few kids went to schools more than 4 hours away AND out of state. Each year, maybe 3-4 out of the 700 students graduating would go to ivies or other highly selective schools, and they were definitely in the very top echelon rank wise, or an athlete or had some other very, very strong hook. Not that many kids would even apply to such schools, so that high school just is not known in the select school circles, whereas here in the NYC suburbs, there are a number of schools, both public and private where 25-40% of the kids go to selective colleges. At my son’s private school, there would be maybe one or two kids who would go to a SUNY each year.</p>
<p>Our school ranks. I personally like it. Our top twenty are only seperated by a percentage point and knowing personal rank makes everyone work harder and compete more.</p>
<p>I like competition and this makes it fun 
Plus, you know where you stand…it’s nice</p>
<p>^If you like the competition fostered by ranking, rocket, are you sure you’d be happy at a “collaborative” LAC? ;)</p>
<p>MANY years ago I went to a HS which did not weight classes. We had one person in the top 10 who took shorthand and typing. The others were in the college prep curriculum. The HS of DDs does it differently. Val and Sal are determined by UW GPA (to get the most Vals for instate merit awards) but the deciles are determined by Weighted GPA. As far as those schools that don’t weight because the bottom tier are probably better than the best at regular schools, I think that’s bunk. Some top students will always go to regular schools. And colleges already give weight to the competitiveness of the schools.</p>
<p>I think there is still competition at an LAC Keil</p>
<p>Qialah</p>
<p>Top three in her class were 4.52, 4.47 and 4.42 weighted. Then there was a large gap and most from the top 10 decile did not crack 4.0.</p>
<p>My kids’ high school ranks and uses a weighted GPA. It’s become clear to me there is no perfectly fair ranking system - few systems seem to be able to correct for people who want to take electives like band and orchestra, no system can take into account that my kids didn’t always get to take the AP classes they wanted because of schedule conflicts, some systems encourage more gaming than others. For what it’s worth, from what I can tell while kids at our school worry about what will “look good to colleges” few if any worry about what will hurt their rank. It helps that rank is top secret until October of senior year and is then written in stone. In both my sons’ classes the top ranked kids were ones who’d also been the top kid in middle school - they cared about grades and were also taking demanding schedules. But from what I can see the kids who are say 3-10 don’t seem to have worried much about rank at all. I think our school does a decent job of sorting though there are some kids with easier schedules who ended up in front of my younger son - they got closer to straight A’s presumably and he definitely didn’t. </p>
<p>My own high school did not rank. We knew who the “smart” kids were, but I never even figured out a grade point average for myself, nor as far as I know did my friends. I suspect that the school reported more than 10% of us as in the top 10% of the class. We were a strong class - out of 80 girls, 6 ended up at Harvard, 4 at Yale, 2 at Princeton, 1 at Swarthmore and lots of the rest were at other Ivies or Seven Sister schools. I think not ranking served us well. We still agonized over SAT scores and worried till April. (I don’t remember ED or EA being an option.)</p>
<p>My son’s magnet school does not weight and does not rank. I support this.</p>
<p>One of the school’s main goals is to get students to challenge themselves, and so they try to remove all barriers to taking the toughest course load available. There are numerous classes in which few students get A’s, and one or two in which even B’s are scarce. (These classes are typically taught by former college professors who refused to “dumb down” the material for high schoolers, to their credit.)</p>
<p>These are classes that grade-grubbers would avoid like the plague. I feel that by not weighting or ranking, the school forces adcoms to read the profile and examine the transcript more carefully, giving a better impression of the student’s capabilities than weighted GPA and numerical rank would provide.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any further thoughts on post #23? Since our district is looking at possibly making this change I am trying to research if it is a good or a bad idea in our situation. Since most of our students will go to Texas public colleges and instate admission is so focused on rank with the top 10% law, I do have some concerns about how students below the top 10% will fare if they are not ranked since most Texas public schools do rank. From all I have read so far I can’t see any reason why we would want to stop ranking our HS students.</p>
<p>rocket - Many, many LACs pride themselves on being non-competitive. Earlham does not rank its students; Reed doesn’t disclose final grades unless you specifically request them from the registrar; at Bryn Mawr and Haverford it’s taboo to ask about others’ GPAs or test grades.</p>
<p>I’m with Consolation. Until a couple years ago, our HS ranked students. No classes were weighted; band and vocal music were worth the same amount of credit as AP Calculus and AP Biology; everyone was required to take PE every semester and that too was included in the GPA and rank; and an A+ grade was worth 4.33 points on a 4-point scale. As a result, the top ranked students were not the ones who took AP classes. They were typically the “professional” music students (who were guaranteed A+'s in every band and vocal music class they took each semester/year by the teacher who wanted to keep music program numbers up); and kids who avoided taking classes where not many A+'s were given.</p>