<p>I am all for recognizing academic achievements, music and sport awards, but we have to compare apples to apples. With so many levels of coursework available in HS (College, AP, Honors, General, Voc Ed and Special Ed) it is misleading information to lump all students together and report a rank. In our system we have severely cognitively impaired students ranked higher than kids with all B’s and one C. I am not trying to make all equal and happy, but I am trying to be fair for the kids who have taken the most difficult courses, but were less than perfect. Once again, it is less about prestige here and more about acceptance rates and money!</p>
<p>buckeye7: I agree about the information from the state. Where is this coming from? Who benefits from this? Who promoted this? There must be money to be made for someone in the private sector from this, but at first glance, it doesn’t look good for our public school systems. I had heard nothing of this in the making. How could that be? It seems like it might be a major change for the state. Maybe we should start a new thread to see if we can get more information.</p>
<p>Wildwood, have you considered organizing a boycott? Get all the parents of the smart kids to refuse to take AP and other advanced classes until the ranking system is changed. Let them all crowd the easier classes, taking the A’s away from the more average students. The parents of the more average students will scream and the school’s reputation will decline, due to its lack of advanced classes (no school can afford to teach such classes if there are only a handful of willing students in the class).</p>
<p>The smart students can get together in groups and self-study for the AP tests; they don’t need to take the AP classes or any class at all in the subject material to take the test. The smart students can band together to take classes at the local university and NOT have the grades released to the high school.</p>
<p>Don’t forget to get the local media involved! </p>
<p>Bureaucracies can take a long time to change, but if you severely disrupt the status quo, they will have to make accommodations, and quickly. I doubt if it would take 3 months to get the changes put into place.</p>
<p>Quite honestly, most of the parents don’t even know what is going on with class rank. Most don’t know what their kid’s rank is. I hate to say it but, to many, it doesn’t matter. Most of the kids will be going to nearby state universities and will not be eligible for their top scholarship. I did not know what my D’s rank was until I was told about the scholarship issue by a selection committee member. There is not a strong group of parents that I know of, except for football - the one group that might not want to change current class rank reporting. Historically, coaches have advised players not to take more difficult courses as they take too much time. When these players get good grades by taking general courses, they can still write “first in their class” on their applications, hence increasing their chance of getting a decent athletic scholarship. Being too vocal about a change, even when it is most fair, could wake sleeping dogs. </p>
<p>I will keep this plan in my mind if it would be needed down the road, but right now, I feel working within the system might be best. The superintendent and at least one board member is in total agreement with me. I haven’t spoken with other members, but I feel certain at least one other will be in agreement. I will have a hard time understanding and accepting that it actually needs to take that long for this minimal change. There will be a meeting in August. I will be there.</p>
<p>We take care of this by weighing courses. This not only helps with inequity but also helps to encourage students to challange themselves by taking the most difficult claseses offered. Pretty much every year the top 10 seniors are students who have taken most if not all of the AP courses offered.</p>
<p>LoremIpsum: You did get me thinking that maybe I should make sure there is a showing of parents of high academic students at that board meeting in August. Thanks for the indirect tip!</p>
<p>csdad: I would agree with reporting class rank if the classes were weighted, but the administration and teachers are against it. It all doesn’t matter now either, as beginning this fall, the State of Ohio now forbids any weighting of classes. </p>
<p>In the meantime, the best I can hope for is to get them to stop reporting class rank.</p>
<p>Out state requires that all students in the top 8% of their class be accepted at the state U. Therefore, class rank is all important. But we weight for Honors and AP classes. Even then, some students who don’t take Honors can make it into the top 10 of the class, not just top 8%. Weighting and grades = rank. A student with no Honors can have a 4.0, but one with AP and Honors can have a 6.0.</p>
<p>If your student is applying to the most selective schools, the non weighting is not going to matter for admissions. Those schools tend to unweight the gpas anyways when looking at grades/class rank stats, and then give a rating based on the unweighted grades. Then, the difficulty of the curriculum/school is taken into consideration in another rating. My son who had a 3.0 but took the hardest course load available at a very rigorous high school would get the top score for curriculum difficulty, and then another different score for grade/class rank which would be adjusted for his school. </p>
<p>Where kids get shafted with ranking and gpas without weighting is with schools that do not take the time to assess the transcripts that way. There are colleges, including a lot of state schools that have goodies for the valedictorian, for instance, or have gpa scholarships. If your kid has an unweighted 3.4 average and the cut is a 3.5, that could be a problem. I’ve seen kids get the raw end of the stick in such circumstances. </p>
<p>Though my son’s counselors would write specifically about the unweighted grades and the school profile made it very clear about the rigor of the school, the academic quality of all of the students and the lack of grade inflation, there are times it did not make a bit of difference to a college or scholarship program. You need a 3.5 and you sport a 3.4, you can be out of luck. That is the disadvantage of being from such schools.</p>