<p>Our S just got his 10th grade report. All A's, both last and this year. His ranking dropped from 3 (last year) to 9/300 (this year). His 10th grade courses are: Hon. English, Hon. Spanish, Choir, Hon. Math, AP Chem, AP Gov. He got 800 on SAT Chem and 790 on SAT Math. He's worrying about his ranking and what not. I assured him his courses are challenging enough and that he'd be fine etc. Not seeking help or anything, I just need to vent out... Ha, I feel better already!!!</p>
<p>One reason I don’t like weighted grades. Your son will have no choice but to drop Choir if he wants to stay in the rat race.</p>
<p>I hear you both. My S12’s HS doesn’t weight, which also sucks a different way. He has taken the most challenging courses anyway and out of numerous honors and AP classes has only had three Bs (with the rest As). Due to NON-weighting, he is barely in the top 10 percent, with many of the students above him taking far less challenging classes. He did get all fives in his recent APs though, yippee!</p>
<p>Our school ranks based on weighted classes also, and there is usually no way to move up more than a place or two in rank after a couple years. Don’t sweat it, and don’t let your son obsess over it. Our top kids got into excellent schools, and I didn’t see any remarkable boost from being val or sal. Fortunately, if good colleges are aware of your school, they know that a few numbers of ranking are not meaningful. This is doubly true at our school, which has over 40 different languages spoken in the home, meaning that the some of the kids really work hard for good grades and scores in English, and are sometimes not accelerated in grade school because of language.
Colleges want to see interesting, talented kids who can make a difference on campus. Let your kid take choir, if he loves it.</p>
<p>No worries. He is still in the top 5%. his test scores are great. he will be a great catch for many wonderful schools. Check with his GC to be sure that his schedule is “the most demanding.” It looks as though it clearly is. The best schools are not interested in the “rat race” kids who merely chase class rank for four years.</p>
<p>For university admissions purposes, rank matters at some schools, but not at all at others.</p>
<p>If the high school uses Naviance, take a look and see where the kids are getting accepted to college. Or talk to the guidance counselor. THere are some schools where kids in the second quintile get into ivies and other highly selective college. If that’s the case, it’ s not a problem. But if it’s one of those schools where only the top few kids get into selective schools ranking can be an issue.</p>
<p>As illustrated in the above examples, there probably is no ranking system that is fair to all. Venting is understandable. </p>
<p>My son would have been in the top 1% or 2% without his 10 semesters of unweighted music classes. Instead he hovered around 5% (with many weighted IB classes and only 2 Bs). But it was a top high school, so overall it probably did not hurt him for college acceptances. </p>
<p>There is one college scholarship he may have missed due to rank, but that college would likely have rejected him w/o his music passions. Also we think he may have missed a corporate scholarship based on rank criteria, but it could have been due to other reasons. The bottom line is we encouraged him to do what he loved. We are not sorry that we didn’t “play the game” chasing top rank. </p>
<p>Another student in his school was in a similar situation due to unweighted electives. That student ended up at a top (first choice) college and also received many other honors. Rank isn’t everything. </p>
<p>So keep the faith, OP. Sounds like you have a great kid!</p>
<p>Weighted rank can definitely be touchy in practice. I graduated HS the year before AP Japanese was offered (my teacher was on the AP committee, so we were “pilot students” for some the materials), and taking Japanese hurt my WGPA/rank a bit, as it was the only language with no AP option. However, I think taking high level Japanese was also a psuedo-hook for me, especially combined with placing at Japanese speech contests, officership and lettering in the Japanese club, JNHS membership, Japan Bowl, etc.–probably pretty unusual for a non-native/non-heritage speaker. Also, my Japanese teacher is/was an amazing woman who I still email and speak to (in Japanese, of course!) periodically 5+ years later, and I wouldn’t trade that for a slightly higher rank. Even with Japanese plus college prep [i.e., unweighted] math for 3/4 years, I still managed to place in the top 2% of my (highly competitive) graduating class, although missing top 1% by 2 or so places did kind of bug me at the time (seems really immaterial now, by the way! 
). </p>
<p>At my HS, PE was a big “punisher” in terms of weighted GPA for the high ranked kids and so many paid for outside PE, which required 90 certified hours per half-credit (we needed 1.5 PE credits) at a certified facility to wasn’t factored into GPA, saving a 4.0 UW grade. This cost money (unless your kid worked off their practice), so it was probably unfair in that way, but I honestly don’t think anyone really benefited from in school PE classes–anyone with any athletic inclinations at all either did a school support or outside PE, so the PE classes were quite literally filled with kids who spent the entire time sitting on or under the bleachers and discussing sex, drugs, and partying–my not-at-all interested-in-sports brother readily admitted to spending all of PE talking with his friends under the bleachers and was perfectly satisfied with his D in that class, as were my parents. I took one semester of PE before declaring it utterly useless, detrimental to my class rank, and worked with my parents to find a way to take outside PE (this all was complicated by the fact that I have a fairly severe physical disability and thus could do very little of the activities in PE). I got far, far, far more out of my outside PE aikido training, physically, socially, and academically (in terms of being able to take another AP class instead of PE), and I’m still incredibly grateful I was able to go that route.</p>
<p>Although WGPA class rank certainly has its flaws, I do think it’s a better overall system than UWGPA class rank. Before my high school switched to WGPA class rank, we had classes with 60-100+ “valedictorians” (out of about ~1100 students per class, closer to 1200 per class when I graduated), meaning 1 or 2 B’s could easily drop you out of the top 10%. Because this was in Texas, where the top 10% was pretty much all that mattered to a <em>lot</em> of students, this lead to strong students who really wanted to go to A&M or UT purposely avoiding AP classes they could have done very well in and probably gotten more out of.</p>
<p>“If the high school uses Naviance, take a look and see where the kids are getting accepted to college.”</p>
<p>The local public restricts access to Naviance. Rising Seniors are supposed to have access, though it’s unclear whether they get access the summer before Senior year or after the Senior Year SAT scores are posted. It doesn’t really matter though, because (until two years ago) the HS Newspaper published a list showing colleges where the top ten students would be attending. Typically that list would have a student or two heading to the state flagship, four or five heading to Tier 2 privates, and the remainder choosing Tier 3 schools. Yeah, that’s the top ten students in the class. As you might suspect, the school has a massive grade inflation issue, with the majority of students having A averages.</p>
<p>Only one HS in our family’s experience handled the issue well. It was a competitive private HS. Their philosophy was “As you can see from our test scores, ALL our students are excellent. Let us tell you what’s special about each one.” Of course they did have test scores to back that up.</p>
<p>^
Ouch. I was in the top 2% of my high school class and attended a third tier public u (at back in 2006; under the new USNWR rankings, it’s numbered but near the bottom of the number list). I did well academically, had a peer-reviewed publication before I graduated college (and first/solo-authored one within my first year of grad school), made great connections, and got multiple, funded offered to PhD programs, including one of the most selective in my field. I also had a great experience there, both socially and academically. So, a top student going to a third tier school doesn’t always equal grade inflation/underachiving.</p>
<p>We don’t actually have as much grade inflation as some public schools, so even though unweighted music classes were in the mix, though other non academic classes weren’t, it actually helped my younger son. He’d have been ranked much lower without them. (He was one kid away from top 5%!) There is occasionally a student in the top 5% of our high school class who has gotten top grades, but hardly any AP courses, but they are pretty rare. Sometimes it’s economics and family values, some parents don’t want their kids to leave the area, so they end up at CUNYs.</p>
<p>“So, a top student going to a third tier school doesn’t always equal grade inflation/underachiving.”</p>
<p>Two years ago, ninety percent of my D’s class had (unweighted) averages of 93 or better. Standardized testing put the class slightly above the state mean … which is not a compliment since the inner city schools in CT have REALLY low scores. </p>
<p>I’m not suggesting that top students must attend top schools. I am saying that when no top kids attend top schools … despite A averages … that there’s something amiss.</p>
<p>Rankings are BS and should be dropped. Let the kids’ grades, courses, and test scores speak for themselves, I say.</p>
<p>jvtDad, good for you for encouraging your son not to worry about it! With grades and test scores like that, he’s going somewhere great, or somewhere for free, or both.</p>
<p>I’m so excited my school is dropping rankings. The GPAs are so close that a single B (or a CP class) can knock you from the top quintile to out of the top decile.</p>
<p>I disagree that class rankings are bs. They provide a means to determine (at least roughly) where a student stands in relation to his/her classmates. At some schools a 4.0 will put a student at the top of his class and at others such as our local HS, a 4.0 will not get a student anywhere near the top 10%. So, taken along with gpa, difficulty of schedule, test scores, etc. the class rank can be very useful. It’s part of the big picture.The colleges also know if your child attends a very competitive HS.</p>
<p>That said, there is no point in splitting hairs. There is very little difference between a student ranked # 3 in a class of 300 and a student ranked #9. The colleges know that, too.</p>
<p>We could debate all day over the “fairness” of class ranks. There are pros and cons to grade weighting as other posters have pointed out. When our local district went through a grade scale change a few years ago I proposed that letter grades be eliminated in favor of numbers. That eliminates the “missed an A by one point” issue as well as distinguishes between a student with a 99% average and one with a 90% average. I additionally suggested that non academic classes (i.e. PE, fine arts, newspaper, etc.) be graded pass/fail. The colleges are not interested in these grades anyway. I know this is not a perfect system (what is?), but I felt it was the most fair. Some of the school board members listened to my ideas, but ultimately chose to keep the letter grades, change the scale and increase both the weighting amounts and the number of classes eligible for weighting. (resulting in ridiculously inflated gpa’s).</p>
<p>S’s HS does not rank, however it is a very selective admissions, nationally known magnet school. In this case it does not make sense to have class ranks.</p>
<p>Does it make sense to rank when ninety percent of the class has numerical averages 93 or above? (That’s 150 kids fit into seven percentage points … a bit less that 0.05 percentage point between kids on average. “Hey, I got a 96.047 on my Algebra test, but the teacher rounded it up to 96.05!”)</p>
<p>Frustrated here, too. My son has a 4.3 W and a 4.0 UW and comes in at #33 or so out of 315. Not even top 10%. The only reason it becomes an issue for us is that there is one school he would consider but only if he was accepted to the Honors Program (big school). Unfortunately, they only invite top 5%. I think he has only had one B+ in 6 semesters - the rest A’s or A-'s.</p>
<p>It’s not grade inflation, though. ACT/SAT scores match the high GPA’s. There are just a heck of a lot of smart kids in this school.</p>
<p>Wow, my take on this was totally different! My thought was that Junior year is harder than the previous two, particularly for kids who are taking honors classes, so you’ll start to get some meaningful separation between students. Guess I’m not used to the amount of grade inflation many of you experience!</p>
<p>IJUSTDRIVE…I am hoping there is some truth to that. My son finished his junior year strong…brought his cumulative GPA up from 4.28 last year to 4.31 - which doesn’t sound like much, but he just needs to move up 2 spots to get into the top 10%. Our school doesn’t actually rank - they put kids in top 5%, 10% and 25%…so if he doesn’t make top 10% he gets lumped in with the top 25% group.</p>