In middle school, I had a teacher who taught four periods of the same class, two before lunch and two after lunch. One section had true/false questions. Before lunch, all of them had the same answer. After lunch, all of them had the same answer which was opposite of the before lunch version.
Using different versions of the test for make-up tests should be standard procedure among teachers.
If class rank is used, the GPA calculation for class ranking should be modified to avoid creating the perverse incentives described in #17 (e.g. taking study halls or empty periods instead of extra unweighted academic electives). Also, avoiding giving students incentive to skip core academic courses in favor of AP electives should be considered when designing the GPA calculation method.
As far as we have lived in our town, which has a highly ranked public school, there has been no class ranking. It is not a problem at all.
Our school does not weight, does not rank and does not provide deciles either to the student to to colleges. All that is available is the total class size of the previous graduating class and it’s average gpa. All one can infer is if they are likely in the top or bottom half of their class.
It’s very freeing. Kids take what they want to take and self select their rigor. It fosters a team environment not a competitive one. I think it’s fabulous.
No Val. Salutorian is audition based and called senior speakers.
My kids private day school does weighting and does not rank. It does release top 5%, 10% etc. The top kids do great in college admissions. They don’t all get in every school they apply to but they all get in to selective schools. My definition of selective school is a bit broader than the general CC definition. I include the top 50 universities and top 25 LAC in my definition.
The top kids are pretty focused on selective college admissions but we do not have the craziness of kids refusing to take interesting classes just get a slightly higher GPA. The school does weight AP classes higher than honors classes. I’m glad my son took a broad selection of electives. He took Poetry , Literary Magazine, Comparative Government, World Religions, Film as Literature as academic electives. They were a mix of honors and AP classes but all interesting to him. I think if he had to worry about class rank he wouldn’t have taken some of those classes.
Val/Sal are not announced until after college applications are submitted. If a college absolutely requires class rank the school will give it so some of the kids know their actual class rank but I don’t think has caused any issues. So far ED/EA acceptances that I know of are Notre Dame, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins. My son of course is
still waiting…
Our district (suburban upstate NY) ranks. There are neighboring districts that do not. One difference in our ranking is that all classes count equally, including PE (which is prorated for ranking only because it’s not 5 days a week). There’s no weighting for AP or Honors.
This has plusses and minuses. The main plus – based on OPs comment, is there’s no need to take a full schedule of APs to game the system to inflate a weighted GPA for rank. A kid can take band or drama or public speaking without penalty.
The minus. In the past, there have been situations where smart kids gamed the system by not taking any Honors or AP classes to inflate their rank. Of course, this is self defeating on college apps since they aren’t taking a rigorous class load, but does push others down in the ranking, perhaps unfairly. Also, since PE is included, you better be at least moderately sporty to keep your rank up.
Val/Sal are announced in late winter I believe, after most apps are due, so it includes final grades for half-year classes in the first half of senior year.
EDIT: New York, like Texas, has at least one scholarship opportunity based on class rank, so even schools that don’t publish rank need to be able to report if a student is in the top 10% of their class. SUNY offers full tuition scholarships to top 10% ranked students who enroll in a STEM program and agree to stay in NYS working in STEM for 5 years post-graduation.
I just found this a bit funny…
Maybe the reason many of you support no ranking at all is you can infer from the quality of your highly ranked selective private or neighborhood public that all of the kids are competitive for top schools. I personally support decile or quartile rankings, but since we are at a large texas public it’s unlikely to change soon.
@beyondtx I do not think there are many schools in the US where all of the kids are competitive for top schools. My kids go to a well regarded private day school that does not rank but does provide top 5%, 10%, etc. Despite the high level of instruction, the high tuition and the generally high level of student at the school the entire class of 350 students is not competitive for top schools.
The kids do great in admissions. We always have kids go to top schools. We also have plenty of kids who go to college but not to top schools. I am sure that is true for @happy1 as well. It is not likely that every single kid in the entire school is competitive for top schools.
My high school didn’t rank and it was very competitive / college-focused. A lot of really excellent kids who “only” had a 94 or so might be in a relatively low percentile and it would hurt rather than help them.
No class rank for us and we like it. Every high school has a profile so yes, colleges can make inferences (to a point).
Our district doesn’t rank either, but we does offer summa cum laude, magna cum laude and cum laude at graduation (not on the transcript). They set GPA targets for each and they don’t change from year to year, so they are not percentages, just GPA targets. I know the summa cum laude GPA is 4.4 across your entire 4 years of high school.
While I suspect this system allows for students to take non weighted courses like art and band without concern over rank, it does mean that whoever is #1 and #2 do not get the title of Val or Sal.
The top kids talk and many times compare GPAs. Through the grapevine we happen to know my DD has the highest GPA in her class, but will never be recognized as such, either by the transcript or at graduation. At least the kids voted her “most likely to succeed/best student” for the yearbook, but it isn’t as good as Val/Sal recognition.
So, at the other end of the spectrum, there are kids who have the rank, but don’t get recognized for it. That is hard as well.
Eh. I see that many feel strongly against ranking. I don’t. Rank, don’t rank, it wouldn’t have mattered to us. D took a challenging course load to challenge herself, get a well-rounded education, and prepare for college. She also took PE, art, and music (all included in GPA). She is still highly ranked at a competitive school. We wouldn’t have made any different decisions if her school didn’t rank.
What if your D knew she was .02 points away from being Val or Sal @itsgettingreal17 ? Do you think that may have changed her courses and her motivation to choose one over the other?
Our school doesn’t publish rank but it does designate a valedictorian and salutatorian so they obviously calculate it to get numbers one and two. It also tracks the top 9% for UC admissions purposes.
The val and sal in my son’s graduating class last year avoided the notoriously tough classes. They also chose not to be part of the collaborative social groups that formed among the rest of the top students (one of them actually said, in all seriousness, that it was “stupid” to help the competition).
I’m perfectly happy with this type of ranking. It lets kids compete for those types of honors if that’s what they value but the majority of top students don’t care about it. Taking Mr. X’s brutal AP English class is a decades long rite of passage at the school and kids know that their GPA is likely to take a hit if they sign up. Seats in the class remain filled though as stories come back from previous classes about how well Mr. X prepared them for college writing. I suspect that having the self-assurance to take that class reflects in the counselor and other teacher recommendations.
I guess I was weird. I was in the running for val, but I knew I wanted to go into engineering, so I took tough classes. I also took AP English because I enjoyed analyzing literature. The competition spurred me to work harder. I ended up being #1, so I got a scholarship from UT.
@suzyQ7 No. Neither of us ever cared one bit about Val/Sal. I personally never understood the obsession with it. D wouldn’t have even been interested in giving a speech. I do understand that a tiny number of colleges offer a scholarship to the Val/Sal.
I will tell you, however, that the separation at the top of D’s class is in fact hundredths. D doesn’t talk about grades and rankings so has no idea how it all shakes out. She knows her own rank and that of her closest friends, but otherwise doesn’t care. She’s competitive with herself only and so long as she kept her rank about certain scholarship thresholds, she was content.
This is why most of feel so strongly against ranking. The ranking is meaningless at the top.
The “UC top 9%” is actually a threshold GPA calculated by UC based on previous classes from the high school. So the high school need only inform current students whether their (UC weighted capped) GPA is above that threshold GPA. Students are not competing against each other for “UC top 9%” status.
@beyondtx I do not think I said, nor did I want to infer that every student gets into a top tier college from my local HS. Quite frankly, that would be a ridiculous expectation, particularly in a public school where there are no entrance requirements to the HS other than living in the town.
When I said that it has been “no problem at all” I hoped to make the point that the students in our local HS seem to get into very appropriate and well-matched schools given their academic achievements, ECs etc. without the HS giving out class rank. College admission officers utilize data points such as (but not limited to): course rigor, GPA, standardized tests, letters of recommendation etc. to assess student’s academics. In no way should that be construed to mean that every student is at a top tier college. Apologies if it was not clear enough in my first post.
And I do think that not having class rank does reduce a bit of that competitive edge between students. And I agree with the point @rebeccar made as well. I would say that not having a class rank is a net positive in my local HS.
@ucbalumnus -That’s a good point. Students who are notified that they meet the threshold generally take it to mean that they are in the top 10% even if that’s not necessarily the case.