<p>Well, there's a rumour going around my school that we're going to discontinue class ranks starting with this current semester. While I doubt it's true (since it's obviously unconfirmed), I was wondering what reasons do schools have fur using no ranks, especially at public schools.</p>
<p>Daughter attended a high school that does not rank. If you look at a number of common data sets you will find that in the freshman class just a little over one-half of the students submitted ranks (contrary to popular belief)</p>
<p><em>blushes</em> I totally didn't notice I said fur and not for. Sorry.</p>
<p>No school in our district ranks, which hurts the top 4%, according to Michelle Hernandez. </p>
<p>There are numerous reasons for it:</p>
<p>1) cynical -- Board members' kids are in remediation classes adn would feel bad.</p>
<p>In unweighted gpa schools, it's unfair to hurt a kid's rank bcos s/he took an AP/honors class and received a B while someone else who took into to Piano Keyboard, comic book lit and received an A. </p>
<p>In weighted gpa schools:
2) kids try to game the system, i.e., take a class at a junior college instead of HS for an extra grade point.</p>
<p>3) top kids refuse to take unweighted classes, such as yearbook or Orchestra, which will hurt their gpa even if they get an A bcos one of their colleagues will takes an AP course and receive a weighted A.</p>
<p>Thanks bluebayou. If this rumour proves true, I would suspect it is because of reasons #2 and #3. We have lots of kids who have to audit regulaur classes (like people on yearbook and newspaper) to stay where they are.</p>
<p>"Board members' kids are in remediation classes and would feel bad."</p>
<p>bluebayou you made my day! Hilarious! And choosing to put the cynical explanation first - excellent! Now excuse me for a moment while I put my adult face back on ....</p>
<p>Due to factors that would take W-A-Y to long to document, a significant proportion of kids in our area who value academics have moved to private high schools. Having expropriated dozens of likely vals and sals from publics, private schools are loathe rank. Yes it hurts the top 4% or so, and GCs have to do extra work to convey the true virtues of tippity top students. But consider the situation from the school's point of view. What administrator wants to face the parent (who by the way has spent $80K on his child's high school education) of a B+ student with 1350 SATs and say "Your S/D is 105th in his class of 118."</p>
<p>I don't think many kids (if any) are leaving my public school for private schools. One, we don't have very many privates here, and secondly, the privates that are here are VERY VERY expensive, and almost everyone here is middle class. Also, 2-3 of the privates are catholic schools, and that leaves 3 schools, 1 co-ed, 1 boys and 1 girls. It's ultra competetive, and you have to enter the system as a freshman, and I haven't met anyone who's left through this way. </p>
<p>I think kids gaming is a pretty big deal here. For example, there is one kid (and one kid only) who is taking 4 AP classes. There are 15 people taking 3 AP classes, and 25-35 taking 2 AP classes. Everyone else is taking 1 or none (which is about 400 people).</p>
<p>
[quote]
No school in our district ranks, which hurts the top 4%, according to Michelle Hernandez.
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</p>
<p>As 53.5 % of the class of 08 submitted rankings 46.5 did not.</p>
<p>Our public school doesn't rank either, but it certainly hasn't hurt our graduates. Probably 20 -25% go to Umich, we always have some attending Ivy League schools or MIT. Many go to LAC's and a large number attend other public schools in our state.</p>
<p>The principal explained the reasoning as students choosing classes blamed on where they would rank rather than on what would be good for their education.</p>
<p>As a freshman, my D did not know about the "gaming" required to land in the celebrated top ten of the class. She took classes she enjoyed as well as honors everything else. There are a few kids in her class who are not in marching band and audit phy ed ,etc.to maintain gpa. Who wins in the end? I hope they all do--cause I sure feel for those who have limited ecs due to the honors/ap focus of high school. </p>
<p>Some of my Ds teachers have complained to me over the years about the ultracompetitive atmosphere in their classes, which at times smothers the pure teaching/learning that should be going on. I am all for getting rid of the class rank. Too often it snuffs out learning for the sake of learning. At its worst, it creates animosity among the students.</p>
<p>I hope we do implement it. Ironically, today is the top ten luncheon for all students in the top ten (teachers talk about them, everyone praises them, all the administrators come, parents come, really really good food I've heared). I've taken a mix of classes I like, but the pressure was on for this year, and next, which is really stressful when you can't take classes you want because you're rank will drop 2-3% at least if it's not AP (this is unfortenately the truth at my school).</p>
<p>This topic actually came up earlier today on the "Who's read 'A is for Admissions'?" thread.</p>
<p>
I replied that this was exactly the thinking behind the decision at my daughter's hs (a suburban public school with close to 300 students per grade) to drop class rankings for the class of 2004, keeping only the designations for valedictorian and salutatorian. The school argued--and I'm still not sure whether they were right or wrong--that any student ranked below #2 in the class would come across better to adcoms if the school simply did not rank. I believe the decision was also influenced by a general trend among high-achieving public schools to drop class ranks; if all the best schools were doing it, then they wanted to do it too. Here's a link to a 1999 article about the phenomenon that still seems pretty apt: <a href="http://www.sharon-herald.com/schools/99schools/99grad/99gradx3.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.sharon-herald.com/schools/99schools/99grad/99gradx3.html</a>.</p>
<p>In my daughter's case, the question of rankings seemed to be more or less moot: There was so much overlap among the schools where the kids with the highest GPAs were applying that any adcom who was interested could have easily put them in order. And I believe the GC's recommendation form commonly asks for an estimate of class rank even if the school does not officially rank. I'm not sure how the elimination of class rank affects applicants to very large, numbers-driven universities, but at highly selective colleges and LACs, I suspect the absence of rankings makes more work for the adcoms but doesn't really affect the outcomes.</p>
<p>We are one of the only schools at our ranking which still ranks. Every other school at or above us doesn't rank anymore. So on top of the school thinking about it, there's a lot of pressure from every other district in our area to drop them.</p>
<p>Ours is another well-regarded public hs that doesn't rank, and hasn't for years. The policy seems to help more high-achieving students than it hurts. This year, there have been acceptances to Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Brown, Penn, UChicago, Georgetown, Williams, Swarthmore, etc. (and, as always, many acceptances to Cornell, for which ours is a kind of feeder school). These students might roughly correspond to the top 5 percent of a 375-member class. Still, I don't know how a kid ranked 18th out of a similar class would fare at an MIT or Brown - it just seems to encourage a closer look at the applicant if that rank number isn't engraved in stone.</p>
<p>I think this really helps students with strong academic records who aren't in the top ten percent. A close friend of my daughter's has had a tough time with math for the past several years, and her GPA probably wouldn't put her in the top decile, yet she was accepted to Bryn Mawr (ED). Not sure what her chances would have been if the rank said 50/375.</p>
<p>Our Counseling Center did a recent phone survey of top schools to determine whether the decision not to rank is in any way a detriment to our students, and the result was a very definite "no." Still, our school has a long history of sending kids to such schools, as well as excellent results in AP/state testing. A student from an unknown hs might do better in the app process with a 1/2/3 rank than with none.</p>
<p>Besides, the rank thing is so confounding! If the difference between #1 and #8 is .001 (maybe the difference between a tough grader and a more tolerant one in English class, or the results of one exam in 9th grade), how excited should we get about #1?</p>
<p>Frazzeled1, that is so true! I made a similar point in another thread recently, about the minute difference in GPAs in the top few percent, due to weighting. Because merit scholarships are often based at least partly on class rank, I can understand why students sometimes feel they must take this into consideration when selecting their classes. (tho my D doesnt feel guilty about having taken Art and Project Lead the Way most semesters!)</p>
<p>
[quote]
These students might roughly correspond to the top 5 percent of a 375-member class. Still, I don't know how a kid ranked 18th out of a similar class would fare at an MIT or Brown - it just seems to encourage a closer look at the applicant if that rank number isn't engraved in stone. I think this really helps students with strong academic records who aren't in the top ten percent.
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I think that must be so, frazzled1. Our school does not rank, and from a graduating class of 123, 13 students were accepted at MIT this year... and some of the top students in the class are not interested in pursuing technical or engineering educations and surely did not apply there. This is a class in a school where you're probably talking about those .001 differences, so any ranking might be fairly meaningless.</p>
<p>our school said they wouldn't put rank... however... they kida slipped up and put it on for one semester by accident lol...</p>
<p>D's former h.s. does not public rank because it removes the emphasis from collaborative education (which is its mission). there willnever be ranking on any of the transcripts only GPA. However, it will rank privately for admissions and scholarship purposes if needed.</p>
<p>My public doesn't rank either. Makes it near impossible for me to do scholarship apps sometimes.</p>
<p>Anyways, officially the school doesn't rank. Unofficially, we do - but not to precise numbers. On the school profile sheet sent to all colleges, there is a ltitle table containing percentages of students with GPAs above this number and that number. So that gives colleges a feel of where we stand. Of course, this is a pretty empty standard: the top 15% have a gpa above 4.5. You can still game the system with ranks, cuz there are plenty of b.s. honors classes to take. That's my two cents.</p>
<p>I believe we're the only district in the area that still ranks, both public and private schools.</p>