<p>I know the merits of ranking and non-ranking high school students have been discussed on CC in the past, but I could not find them with a search. I’m looking for a summary of pros and cons and would appreciate parents’ input.</p>
<p>I would like to suggest to our GC/Principal/Board that the high school consider eliminating ranking. Several years ago, another parent briefly mentioned the possibility to a GC, who argued that in his experience, rank is still very important to colleges, and therefore a “necessary evil”, and the discussion was quickly dropped. I’d like to suggest the option again, but this time with more information. </p>
<p>Disadvantages I have seen with Ranking:
Courses are often selected by students based on their weighted grades rather than interest (although I believe having weighted courses is the better alternative). At our small school, there is also a limit to AP courses. For example, there are no higher level art, music, computer or business courses, and only one AP English course, so students who excel in these areas will probably have an automatic GPA disadvantage over those who excel in the sciences. </p>
<li><p>Some savvy students postpone all the non-weighted requirements (art, music, health, gym, etc.) until their senior year because their rank will be higher when they apply to colleges at the beginning of the academic year. </p></li>
<li><p>Grades are somewhat inflated at our school (primarily A’s and B’s), which can result in looking at a .001 difference to determine actual rank! It gets crazy! Statistically such small differences make little sense, but unfortunately it can make a big difference. For some colleges, scholarships, and state programs (ie. Texas), there is a considerable penalty for a student who falls outside the top 10% even by a single .001 placement. I recognize that the same is true for differences between a gold and silver olympic medal, so perhaps it is my non-competitve nature showing through </p></li>
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<p>Disadvantages with non-ranking schools:
1.The very top or bottom few in any “grouping” are penalized. (ie. if you are at a class of 100 that does not rank, but divides into deciles, being number 10 vs. 11 could have significant implications). However, if the school does not publish specific decile cut-offs, but rather only sends an overall spread to colleges as part of their profile, would the problem be as great?).</p>
<p>For those of you whose children are in non-ranking schools, how does your school handle it? What additional pros and cons can you share?</p>
<p>We do not have ranking. We also do not have grade inflation (which I view as a problem, bcs it puts my son at a disadvantage to a child that is coming from a school with grade inflation, as you mention your school has.</p>
<p>We have lots of honors and APs and class sizing for APs are small. Regular class sizes are huge. This is another problem. To gain entry into honors and APs you must have an A- in a regular or honors for the year, and teacher rec to jump to the next level.</p>
<p>There is a spread sheet that gives the grade for your kiddo and the # of As,Bs, etc. in ea. class. Admissions can compare the candidate's grade to others in class. It seems pretty voluminous. I don't know that a school of 30,000 will be checking out all of this information, but maybe they do. Perhaps they really look closer at whether the gc can strongly recommend a student for a particular school. The latter seems more efficient, but I have no idea as to how it is done.</p>
<p>We do not have ranking. We also don't have grade inflation, which means that the system works great for colleges which know the school (Northeast except for U. Chicago which is very popular; mostly urban universities except for Cornell which is hugely popular); less great for schools outside the Northeast where the school is not as well known. A GPA of 3.4 is a very respectable GPA which makes you competitive for a lot of great colleges, although from reading the posts here you'd think those kids would be destined for refrigerator repair school.</p>
<p>Best part of no ranking is that it has reinforced among the students and the faculty that the school is a meritocracy. Kids are graded on the basis of their work, not their perceived "popularity" with teachers; there's no point in gaming the system trying to figure out how to boost your GPA with fluff courses since there's no ranking anyway. I'm sure there are kids with lightweight programs who graduate with a 4.0 but it doesn't really matter; kids with much lower GPA's do just fine in the admissions process.</p>
<p>Downside is that it hurts kids interested in State schools Honor programs and some scholarship programs. GC's seem to work hard to circumvent that with nice letters of explanation about the schools no ranking policy which has helped.</p>
<p>My D's high school did not rank, but gave deciles, but the counselor can always toss the favourable info (#1in his class) into the letter, if it is helpful. This fact at our school is based on academics only and by exact % in the class, not A v B, so very tough to game it. A top #14 might be a top 10 with easier classes, but there are not that many easier classes and they would still not be #4.</p>
<p>Our school sends 95% on to universities, so this is an important consideration.</p>
<p>I think the worst thing about the ranking is how it can turn in to a numbers game, and once one family takes it there, every one else has to jump on board. I like the way our school did it!</p>
<p>my older daughter tiny ( her graduating class was 18- school is about 350, 6-12) private prep school, didn't rank or weight.
No APs offered, all courses, I assume were supposed to be rigourous or else you can tell teh difference by description. Calculus as opposed to advanced algebra for example.
For the colleges that many apply to ( often LACs) the adcoms are fairly familar with school, and its quality.
Didn't really seem to work against them generally- although I wonder if lack of APs hindered qualifying for some merit awards.
I really had no idea what my D rank would have been, I knew she wasn't at the bottom, but since her grades were mid Bs- I did have impression if she had attended a less rigourous school, that she would have qualified for more aid at a public school that mainly uses numbers for catagorization.
My younger daughter attends a public school that does rank. Have no idea how much grade inflation there is. They do have APs but also honors, but neither are weighted. Her freshman year grades show that she is about in the top 1/3, although fall semester she had straight As, and spring B+s, apparantly some students have straight As all through school</p>
<p>I don't know which I prefer- I liked not having the older daughter worry that she had to take APs, although I also wonder why rank, but not weight Aps with the second school?</p>
<p>Interesting that you'd like to get rid of the ranking at your school! My parents are currently battling the officials at my sister school to finish implementing the ranking system that was voted in two years ago. Right now, the ranking is only disclosed to seniors at the start of their senior year, and disclosed to colleges during the application time. While the ranking is supposed to start in 9th grade, juniors do not know their "official" ranking, unless parents put pressure on the school to respect the existing policy. </p>
<p>As far as I am concerned, the absence of ranking does not eliminate the competition among students nor does it seem to help the jockeying for a higher rank and gaming. What good does it do to a school to play games with its ranking when the colleges DO ask for rankings in direct and indirect ways? It is not so hard to see how colleges obtain the data they seek from known schools. Even if the school uses a decile system, the college will ask for a grade distribution, and accordingly have a de facto ranking. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the smaller or unknown schools that hope to rely on a lack of ranking to inflate their own "top ten percent" and "make students look better" might very well hurt everyone at their school. There is a difference between a top ten percent student and the first or second ranked student, and this difference should be made public. </p>
<p>I am a firm believer that the high schools should provide as much raw and processed information as possible to the colleges -and to the parents- and let the colleges do their own determination of what is important. If possible, ranks should be provided by subjects as well. </p>
<p>For a school NOT to have a ranking policy, they should have a very good reason AND an exemplary track record with colleges. The fact that a ranking might hurt a few feelings should not be an excuse at all. The fewer smoke and mirrors available to high schools, the better off we ought to be.</p>
<p>Our school came up with a good "ranking" compromise. They provide specific rankings for the top 20% of the students. For everyone else, the ranking is reported in deciles. The head GC told me that this gave the advantage to those ranked highly in the class. For those ranked lower, it made less of an emphasis on class rank because the specific ranking wasn't used and deciles were instead. You know...it's probably the only thing I've agreed with our guidance department on in seven years!</p>
<p>You hinted at living in Texas and if you do, it is almost impossible to get into UT without going to a ranking school and being in the top 10%. 75% of students at UT were admitted based solely on the rank, and the rest of the spots are allotted based on a very competitive admissions process (which also includes out-of-staters).</p>
<p>My S's school didn't rank, but apparently most colleges wanted enough information that they could estimate a child's relative rank. Oh, well.</p>
<p>My S was accepted to UT as was most of his class despite the fact that the high school didn't rank. It was a magnet school well known to UT admissions counselors, however. I wonder other schools with out that hook would fare as well.</p>
<p>Sons' school does not rank, but also does not weight grades for difficulty. Small school, about 75 to a class. I should also point out they do NOT award "valedictorian" or "salutatorian."</p>
<p>The form leader (highest GPA) is always the student who aces all the standard classes with few honors or AP. This student gets recognition, but everyone understands the system.</p>
<p>I admit I would see more point to ranking if grades were weighted, but not with straight GPA. My oldest son's class had 9 students who were tied for 1st out of 77, but only 7 or 8 could be the top 10%?? It's ridiculous.</p>
<p>Our high school did away with ranking beginning this year, which is my son's senior year. Guidance took a poll and found that most schools in our county no longer rank. Guidance counselor supposedly is not allowed to mention rank on reports sent to colleges. Rank is reported in deciles with GPA range noted for each decile. So if your student is in top of the class, college would note student's GPA relative to GPA range for that decile. I wish they had retained rank just for the seniors this year. This class has encountered so many changes in the 4 years of high school.</p>
<p>Colleges want ranking data. They want it because ranking publishers want it. High schools can go into denial but this fact remains. Moreover, high school class rank is a valid assessment measure. Rank and test scores correlate highly with first year success in college. Withholding ranking data may have unintended consequences, such as resulting in heavier reliance on test scores. Disclosure only improves transparency and may especially help our brightest kids attain admission.</p>
<p>I would be very interested in seeing the evidence for these statements!</p>
<p>A student who ranks number 1 in a small town high school like mine (where Calculus wasn’t even offered, for example) is much, much, much more poorly prepared for college than the student who ranks number 10 in my children’s private college prep school (where students can take AP Calculus BC in 11th grade and Calc III in 12th grade, for example).</p>
<p>Also, some ranking systems can be gamed; for example, a top student who gets excused from a required regular class or takes a study hall as his 8th class will have a higher GPA than the student who takes either a regular or an honors class as his 8th class in my children’s school. The top students have weighted GPAs of over 5 in a system where a regular A is 4, an honors A is 5 and an AP A is 6. As a result, for students who make all As, taking any class other than an AP class reduces the student’s GPA. Given a small school with limited AP classes and a group of top students who make all As, the student who takes the fewest classes will have the highest GPA and therefore the highest rank.</p>
<p>See citation: Betts, Al
University Business Oct2007, Vol. 10 Issue 10, p100-100
2007. “…a recent
study by the College Board determined
that a combination of class rank and SAT
scores provides the best predictor of first year
success in college. Neither factor alone was a
better predictor than the two taken together.”</p>
<p>Ranking should only be done when using weighted GPAs.</p>
I don’t believe the pressure to take APs came so much for ranking as the belief that colleges want to see APs on the transcript if they are offered. There were some inequities - some languages offered honors level courses sooner for example, my kids occasionally had scheduling conflicts which prevented them from taking honors or AP courses they had wanted to take.
This is easy to solve, don’t include non-academic courses in the ranking
I agree that ranking tends to magnify meaningless differences. Educators ought to understand statistics.
To the point of the disadvantage of not ranking
I believe that deciles if used accurately do hurt kids on the wrong side of the cusp. While my younger son was hurt much less by being 37/734. (One off of the top 5%.) I’m pretty sure admissions officers read spreads and bar graphs and stick in the appropriate numbers. I’m pretty sure that my very small high school probably told colleges that more than 10% of us were in the top 10% of the class. We didn’t rank or have course weightings, no APs till senior year back then, we rarely discussed grades with each other, though I remember endless discussions about SAT scores. I don’t even know what my high school GPA was.</p>
<p>My D’s small private HS in CA does not rank.</p>
<p>I think that, in general, it is positive because it keeps the students NOT focused on competing with each other for class rank.</p>
<p>However, when her HS reports its profile to colleges, it reports UNWEIGHTED gpa and divides students into 5 deciles – top 20%, top 40%, etc… with the mean GPA for each decile. By reporting only unweighted GPA, I think that it does a disservice to the students who take challenging classes.</p>
<p>Case in point. My D who is above the mean in the top decile (so likely in the top 10%) is really in the top 5% when calculating weighted GPA. Fortunately, the University of California system calculates the top 4% for each high school, so my D had it affirmed that she was in the top 4% for weighted (by having UC ELC status), although she was only in the top 10% for unweighted.</p>
<p>Don’t think it really matters. Colleges have too many other criteria to base a decision, based upon DS experience. </p>
<p>DS got robbed.
If the colleges based their decision on GPA, ranking, then DS really had Opportunity stolen from him.
If it was based on APs, GPA, ranking, then he was really cheated. :)</p>
<p>The reason many (most?) highly rigorous private prep schools do not rank is they want to remove any barriers which would prevent highly selective universities admitting students who reside below the top 10%. The private HS’s are known to the adcoms as producing a pool of highly qualified students well down the decile rankings. The universities want these high SAT, well prepared students who have often challenged themselves with very hard coursework–but do not want to suffer in prestige/ranking/perceptions for lowering their reported average accepted student rankings. </p>
<p>For kids from recognized high achieving high schools, no reported rank is therefore probably useful for both HS and college plus the student. In any case, the student’s GPA in comparison with other applicants from the same HS will show a relative ranking for adcoms to ponder.</p>
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