<p>Keilexandria: I guess Rocket won’t be going to any of those schools. I think there is some middle ground on competition. Competition is a fact of the world so it creates an artificial environment if you eliminate it. Still many students at LA schools are seeking a collaborative environment but that doesn’t mean they don’t want any competition. It just means that they can work together and even help each other when needed. It’s one thing to try and be the best and another to steal someone’s notebook or trash their projects to get ahead. Yup back in the old days I have heard of these things happening. I would guess that Rocket doesn’t find that type of competition fun.</p>
<p>S’s HS (around 300 seniors) doesn’t rank. I had to ask them to come up with at least an approximation because one of the colleges S was considering gives merit scholarships of 1/4 tuition for top 30%, 1/3 tuition for top 20%, and 1/2 tuition for top 10%.</p>
<p>181818-that’s kind of what i meant. I want a collaborative learning enivornment not doubt, but I would also like some compeition. My fav LAC Smith does allow kids to graduate with Latin Honors, so I see that as a form of competition</p>
<p>The local school used to rank, but stopped just when QMP entered high school. It is probably not a coincidence that the year before, one of the school’s candidates for a Presidential Scholarship (the national program) was rejected from Princeton. Connecting the dots, I suspect that GC’s might have guessed that the rejection was caused by 2 A- grades in 10th grade literature, which had the effect of bumping the student out of the top 5%. (Grades are unweighted, locally.)</p>
<p>My high school ranked, based on unweighted grades given on a % scale, and carried the GPA computation to 6 figures. Really, it got a little silly. The school did, however, reserve the top 10 spots for students in the “academic” classes.</p>
<p>All in all, I think not ranking is preferable.</p>
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<p>That is hardly enough to keep an otherwise well-qualified student out of Princeton or any other school. He probably just didn’t fit the profile of the type of student they needed to fill out their class.</p>
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<p>Not just silly. Mathematically meaningless. Since an individual grade is assigned a numerical value to a single decimal place, there is no meaningful difference between, say, 3.56 and 3.64. For all practical purposes, they are both 3.6.</p>
<p>I agree, mantori.suzuki, that’s why I phrased the statement about the GC’s as I did. The timing, as far as when the school stopped ranking, seemed like an odd coincidence to me, though.</p>
<p>^^ On the surface, A- isn’t a problem; but dropping out of top 5% rank can indeed be an issue. I doubt that was the “reason” for the Princeton rejection; but when a school ranks, colleges usually favor rank over GPA.</p>
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<p>If the top 20 are separated by one percentage point, I’d argue that there is no practical difference between them and you really don’t “know where you stand” in any meaningful way.</p>
<p>My 10th grader recently brought home a “credit check”–which included GPA and rank. S has a weighted average of 4.15 and is barely in the top 20% of the class! (This is an excellent suburban high school–one of top publics in state).
Either there is a lot of grade inflation going on (the classes don’t seem easy), or there are a lot of really serious and/or grade-grubbing students. Probably both. I agree with weighting grades–the honors classes are so much harder and so much more work, so they should be worth more.</p>
<p>BTW, I am not at all worried about my kid’s rank. He is unlikely to apply to super-selective schools, and is likely to have test scores in top 1-3%, so rank won’t make any difference for him.</p>
<p>At the independent school I work at, we do not rank (less than 100 students in a class) nor do we practice grade inflation (top GPA is typically around 3.75 - with an average closer to 3.2 - with a very tough grading scale (A=95% or more)). We weight but only to a small extent (.25 points for AP). </p>
<p>Ranking is destructive in encouraging students to challenge themselves and disadvantages those in the lower half who, would be among the top students at most public schools in our area.</p>
<p>We simply report quintiles - and most of our first, second and third quintiles have no problems getting admitted to the Barron’s most competitive or highly competitive + colleges. Our fourth and fifth quintiles always have some students who are admitted to the most competitive or highly competitive + colleges - and typically all are admitted at least at a highly competitive college.</p>
<p>not ranking does not disadvantage anyone IMO.</p>
<p>qialah-but there is a difference…that’s the point. The girl who’s first took AP Calc when we were juniors and that showed up. This year, the top 10 are all taking more APs then the next ten. Even though 1% doesn’t seem like alot, it pushes us all to take more and more harder classes with more weight. </p>
<p>As a mediocre public kid, I like ranking. Not all 3.6+ GPAs are created equal. Rank shows how good your GPA is in comparison</p>
<p>blueberry: It is clear that not ranking is not an issue at your school with a very impressive track record but is it an issue for the student who is from a HS with no track record of sending students to Barron’s most competitive colleges? An application to one of these OOS schools may well be the first ap the college has ever received from our HS. If you compound that with no rank will it still not disadvantage the student? It is probably already a disadvantage being from a school without a history in a state with lots of history.</p>
<p>My school ranks. I don’t want to say that my school is a “noncompetitive” public school because it was extremely competitive this year for the top 75 or so students. I ended up 43/400 but with a 105.79 weighted average, my unweighted was a 92.23. I’m actually not in the top 10%, but I think 43/400 sounds better than 25% and I’m only looking at SUNY’s.</p>
<p>Rocket:</p>
<p>My D’s school doesn’t rank, and I don’t think that has caused anybody to take a less rigourous courseload than otherwise. </p>
<p>I’m not sure what you mean when you say all 3.6+ GPAs aren’t created equal. If they aren’t equal then how can they be ranked?</p>
<p>qialah-I meant that between schools. For example, some kids go to very rigorous schools where a 3.6 is very difficult to attain and might place them in the top 5%</p>
<p>Or, you can go to a crappy school where a 3.6 is easy to attain and you might be only in the top 30%.</p>
<p>So, when college sees both students with3.6s, they can see which one means more</p>
<p>And I’m glad that your school works like that. Mine doesn’t. If my school didn’t rank I know I would not be taking the AP Stats class I’m in now. It boosts my class rank and that’s the only reason I’m taking it. I know that sounds terrible, but its true. But, in the long run, I will be better prepared for college</p>
<p>^That’s what GPA distribution charts are for. And GCs will usually comment if you had a particularly difficult teacher (one math teacher at my school is infamous for meriting a mention in the GC rec).</p>
<p>What I’ve heard about “crappy schools” and GPAs is that often students get a 4.0, are top-ranked, and still grossly unprepared for college.</p>
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That’s a terrible reason to take any course. Someone who takes 7 AP classes is not somehow automatically better-prepared for college than someone who takes 6 AP classes.</p>
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<p>Well, IMO if the HS has no history nor track record with the most competitive college to begin with, the student will probably be at some disadvantage whether he/she is ranked or not. In this example, ranking is not the issue. It is the unknown nature of the school. Let’s say this student is the top student in the class - and far better than anyone who has come thru in many years. A school in this situation can try to stress that in the GC rec’s. Just having a number ranking will not help the student</p>
<p>Blueberry: In our situation it is hard to know what will help the student. I think all students need to have as many factors working for them as possible; but perhaps the need is even greater for students from a HS without a track record. Rank is more tangible than GPA. (At our school this student would be ranked even if we went to a no ranking system because the law requries the top 10% to be ranked.) Understand though that just because few students have chosen to apply to and go to most competitive colleges our HS rountinely has a few students who are at that level. It is clear that there are many benefits to not ranking, I started this thread because I was trying to figure out if there are significant benefits for our district. So far it seems that we differ from most of the schools discussed and I think we would be loosing more than we are gaining if we stopped ranking (students below the top 10%).</p>
<p>It all depends on the structure of your school. Remember that most admissions evaluations are holistic. No one number paints the whole picture – it’s all in context. </p>
<p>Having the GC explain your rank in more detail is a good idea; it’s what I had done.</p>
<p>legend: I’m trying to understand what you mean about the GC explanation. I can see if you are ranked lower that expected in a school that is top heavy and only decimals are separating folks of significantly higher rank but if you are top 5 in a class of 300 or greater would there really be any reason to explain any further?</p>