Need Advice - High School Stopped Ranking With No Warning

Parents Forum
121

Thought experiment:

Your school system wants to create a selective-entry math/science magnet program (or similarly selective IB program or something else that will attract top students from all over the district). It will not be an entirely separate school. Instead, it will be located within a larger school, and the kids in it will account for only a portion of each year’s class (say, 1/4 to 1/3).

They want to put it in the high school your kids will attend.

How do you react?

If the school system ranks students, I think you would be horrified by the proposal because the influx of all these top students is going to drive your kid’s rank down.

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I was furious when our HS initially proposed eliminating class rank, even though I understood the arguments the school principal presented. My S had graduated #1, and D was also #1 in her class at the time, and I knew how much the class rank matters. Colleges ask for it, and they use it. My kids were not grade grubbers, but they easily understood how the system worked, and what classes would help vs. hurt in this ranking process. Our state, like several, provides full tuition to Flagship State to Val and Sal, which are determined by rank. The schools proposed only identifying #1 and #2 at graduation - including eliminating the naming of the top ten members of the junior class.

This type of policy change requires school board approval.

H and I spoke at the Board of Ed meetings as concerned parents, and a few Board members agreed with us. There are very real financial implications associated with class rank. Our school board agreed to not only postpone the change, as they felt it was unfair to change policy mid-stream, but they also agreed to provide class rank at the student’s or parent’s request, just not on the transcript any longer. One of our Board members indicated if they were to eliminate this academic recognition, he would propose the elimination of all athletic banners in the school gym, and removing the trophy case. For some kids, academics is what they happen to excel at. It doesn’t make them better or worse than any other kid, but the recognition they were proposing eliminating was purely an academic basis.

At the very least, I believe OP should contact the school board, or superintendent, and inquire what was the process for changing this policy. As angry as you may be tempted - and believe me, I fully understand where you are coming from - it is best to approach them with a proposed solution in mind. This may be the last time OP needs to advocate for her child - who is still a minor, I believe.

As for the school profile - D graduated first with a 5.0 WGPA, while the school profile submitted along with her college applications was updated ever 3 years, so it listed the range of GPAs and the max before her was 4.86…Someone mentioned earlier that it is easy for colleges to tell where your child falls based on the school profile - not necessarily exact, but it was clear from my D’s transcript and the profile that she was a very special student.

While we are a modest, one income family, the aid offers that D received were absolutely terrific. Neither D nor S will graduate with loans, but our FAFSA EFC indicated we would have had to pay much much more than we have.

D is at Stanford, S at Columbia. These schools, along with HYP and other elites, do include the cost of transportation when they calculate COA.

Travelling across the country is hard, but D is the type of kid that thrives when she is among her peers.

Based on what OP wrote about her child, I am confident that she will have several great places to choose from, but I understand how tough a road it can be.

Kudos to OP for raising a child determined to do her best, and achieving it.

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@Marian #120 I would not be horrified, but overjoyed, because my pups would benefit from being in a class with better students, and I am certain mine would still be ranked at the very top.

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I think it is very wise to do away with class rank for the reasons so many posters have given. But it certainly isn’t fair to do so at this stage. They should have made it applicable to this year’s freshmen and the classes that will follow.

However, I can say that for my daughter, who was Sal of her class in 2013, that class ranking thing was a nightmare. Her first high school printed your GPA and your rank on every single report card, like it was a damn horse race instead of evaluation of educational progress. Her second high school did not rank anyone except for Val and Sal, and she only found out she was Sal on the last day of class, well after college acceptance season.

125

Our high school calculates rank once only at the end of the first quarter senior year. My oldest was #8 in a class of about 650. I don’t know if the kids ranked higher than him were gaming the system, but I know we were pretty much oblivious. Some of the top kids were stressed, but not as far as I know about what their rank would be. The #1 kid had been #1 in middle school too. His parents were baffled by him - they were smart and had gone to HYP type colleges, but thought he was much more driven than they had ever been.

My kid lost points for being in Latin (other languages had honors sections for year three) and for having scheduling conflicts (because of Latin) that meant he didn’t take honors physics. OTOH I believe he was the only kid in his class who took an AP as a freshman. It all worked out fine.

126

I’m forever grateful that my school mostly did away with this nonsense by giving everyone with a 4.0 or higher a rank of 1. (I didn’t have a 4.0+ GPA and I don’t remember or care what my rank was).

I feel bad for students who plan their lives around getting that #1 rank. It seems like so many great courses would be nixed in favor of the almighty .001 point.

ETA: Oh, and we had many students who went to Ivy-league and other tippy top schools so it didn’t seem to hurt us much.

127

What could help more is if colleges stopped offering big scholarships that require the student to be rank #1 (or #1 or #2), in order to decrease the pressure to game the high school’s class rank system in order to be able to afford college. Remember that the motivation for the OP and kid was more along the lines of chasing a scholarship that (previously) used class rank #1 as an eligibility criterion.

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But are these scholarships really all that common? I know this was brought up earlier in the thread but I can’t remember what the consensus was.

I don’t remember ever coming across a big scholarship that required one to be ranked 1 (or 2 or whatever). Top 5% or something, yes, but not #1.

129

The same thing happened at my school! I was ranked #1 and now I am so mad because colleges won’t be able to see that. Ugh, the class of 2017 just keeps getting the boot.

My counselor told me that colleges are okay with percentile, but my graduating class is small - just 70 students. And I don’t think percentiles hold well with such a small class.

130

I actually know a lot of people who have been very successful in life, not only in ways like where they went to school (or didn’t), what positions they hold, salary, and also in other very important ways, such as being good and productive citizens, good partners/spouses, wonderful parents, good citizens who give back to their community,etc. I don’t think any of them were ranked #1 in their class. I really can hardly believe the emphasis this is getting, still. Many talented students who are not vals get great scholarships, go to wonderful schools, and succeed in life without being even in the top ten of their classes. If the OP’s daughter continues to do well in school, it will not matter much (if any), if she graduates 2nd instead of 1st, or even 10th instead.

It’s understandably frustrating to work hard for something, only to find out that the goalposts have not only been moved, but been eliminated.I get it. Disappointment ensues, maybe even anger for a short while. At the same time, perspective is really important here, especially in terms of how this situation is framed/presented to the student involved. One does not have to be number 1 in any capacity in order to have an incredibly bright future. There are plenty of full rides for someone who is near the top of their class, yet not designated as valedictorian. So what or who is this really about?

No wonder the youth of today are so stressed out. Only one can be #1. What does that mean for the rest of them?!

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Am amazed that a family that was bright enough to manipulate the system to maintain a #1 spot is not capable of finding universities/scholarships or “financial safeties”…seems like a over emphasis/reliance on the just one aspect of the “game”.

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Yet, your kids did not attend the state Flagship, so it didn’t matter to your family in the end.

Except that barely a third of students who matriculate to S have a high school transcript with a class rank on it. While I could not find Columbia’s common data set, I checked P’ton for a comparable and they show <30% of matriculants provide class rank. Same story at Penn.

Again, class rank did not matter to your family, despite your ‘fury’.

(And yes I get that you did not know it at the time.)

133

Nonsense!

Taking every available AP course, working ones tail off, and succeeding in all of them is “gaming the system”? To the contrary, the high school student who takes a variety of AP courses is necessarily going outside his or her comfort zone - at least in some of them - and I don’t see that as a bad thing. Isn’t that what we’d like all our students to do?

But, no, you say, this particular student is doing it just to get the prize of being ranked #1. Well, I guess if she were doing it just for the bragging rights, I’d agree. But, in this case anyway, the student is aiming for #1 because she was told that it would give her more choices when it comes time to apply to college and, more importantly, would help to make college affordable for her. She deserves commendation for her efforts, not derision.

For those of you who’ve said this student will certainly have several affordable choices . . . well, from your lips to G-d’s ears, but there are never any guarantees.

Someone posted earlier that the OP shouldn’t fixate on CSULB because “maybe there is plenty of money at other California schools.” Uhhh . . . no. There is a small handful of very generous awards, but they are also ridiculously competitive. As the OP has acknowledged, there is certainly plenty of money somewhere, but they likely won’t find it in California.

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"My kids were not grade grubbers, but they easily understood how the system worked, and what classes would help vs. hurt in this ranking process.’

Now there is a way to choose classes…not! Thus the elimination of the ranking process seems like it could have a great impact on education even if a couple of grade grubbers whose parents insist they aren’t grade grubbers (naturally not…lol) but who carefully choose classes for added points (not grades, naturally) are unhappy. Great move schools. Hope others follow!

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@fidoprincess In my opinion you stand a reasonable chance of getting a judge to issue a court order requiring the school to rank your daughter. They issued a set of guidelines; your daughter partially performed, and then they changed the rules after she had performed. I’m not talking about damages, just a suit to enjoin them from not ranking those students they said they would rank.

You should start with the school and work your way up to the school board, and you should make it clear that you believe it is a legal obligation on their part. Only after all that fails should you go the legal route, even if you have to write the complaint yourself.

I have seen a lot of scholarships where being ranked in the top of one’s class gets the money. I don’t kow where these people are from who say it doesn’t matter. To promise a ranking and then to take it away after it has been achieved is theft.

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@EarlVanDorn Several pages back the OP wrote that there was a misunderstanding and her daughter will have a rank on her transcript. Most posters are not saying rank doesn’t matter, they’re saying being ranked #1 will not afford her the additional money the OP is expecting anymore than being ranked 2 , 5 or 10.

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The OP has stated:

So while we can continue to debate whether ranking is a good or bad thing, we don’t need to be advising the OP on what to do about not being ranked (like going to a judge)…It’s a non-issue for the OP now. (And personally, I think it was a non-issue before…there just aren’t many cases where it matters to actually be #1)

I think that (CSULB) was the only example anyone could come up with (and Texas). And that example didn’t fully apply in the past (I gave example of someone ranked lower than 1 in our school because they rank on weighted grades but was still considered “valedictorian” for purposes of applying because of an unweighted 4.0 GPA) and definitely doesn’t apply now. In fact, they’ve really loosened their requirements…anyone with a WEIGHTED GPA of 4.0 (not even an unweighted!) can apply (as well as val’s and NMF).

ETA: Cross posted with @carolinamom2boys who put it much more succinctly.

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Actually @ClaremontMom You said it much better.

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Re: #136

Seems like CSULB used a more lenient definition of “valedictorian” when it did state that as a qualifier for the scholarship. But that more lenient definition was not posted, perhaps causing some students (including the OP’s kid) to try to game their high school’s class ranking system to get #1, rather than just meeting the (unpublished) CSULB definition of “valedictorian”.

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It’s highly unlikely any kind of legal challenge would have an impact in any time frame that would make a difference in this particular case. And it may well turn out the school board does have the power to do this.

I’m sure there are scholarships based on being #1 or #2, but I never encountered one in my extensive searches for merit aid. Maybe there was something specific about the schools that excluded them from my searches. I never saw anything to a finer level of detail than top 5% of class. And schools that don’t rank typically still do provide % information.

SOOOO many highly competitive schools have stopped ranking that it should be clear to colleges that awarding scholarships based on val or sal status would leave a lot of top candidates out of the competition. Why exclude all those kids and focus only on kids from schools that still rank? Only 40% of students applying to Duke came from schools that ranked. I’m betting an awful lot of them would have been val or sal.

If someone takes all AP courses because they want to challenge themselves, more power to them. I discouraged my kids from doing that and encouraged them to step outside their academic comfort zone and study art. It worked for them and didn’t seem to harm their ability to earn scholarships (hard to do a controlled double-blind study on your kids to know for sure). They still earned plenty of AP credit as well.

It does seem sad to think that students might be taking classes purely for an artificial ranking statistic rather than because they want to learn a particular subject. And yes, I do believe val status is artificial, given the factors of weighting and counting that can be wildly different from school to school. The OPs child sounds like someone who will succeed anywhere, it’s just unfortunate if they missed out on some great experiences because of the criteria used to select classes.