<p>Our schools don’t rank but D2 told me some of her friends decide not to take PE in 10th grade for the same reason.</p>
<p>My kids’ schools didn’t rank. but they published a grid indicating that X% of students had between a 3.01-3.25, 3.26-3.5, etc. Was not hard to figure out which band you were in. problem was that both schools had highly selective admit programs that pulled kids from the top 102% of the county, and the tables included ALL seniors, regardless of program. There was no way to tell from that table who was taking full IB and many APs vs. who was taking regular or honors classes.</p>
<p>We are pretty sure that a couple of schools looked at that chart, realized S2 was around 25% and said no thanks, despite the courseload. Fortunately, the ones he DID want paid attention to the challenge level.</p>
<p>S1 got burned on a $40,000 scholarship (at the time, automatic with certain stats and ranking) because the college required confirmation of ranking (even though the HS doesn’t rank) and he was one kid off top 10%. This was a place that really, really wanted S. The college changed its policy after that.</p>
<p>Parents on CC are a pretty sophisticated group. They’ll find a way to make the best from whatever situation HS’s put them in.</p>
<p>I feel badly for all the parents who use their own growing-up experiences a comparators to the current environment. In their day, flagship publics were freely available to B+ students, and prices were such that students could “work their way” through college. Today, A students get deferred, and NOBODY works their way though our state flagship. I’ve tried to communicate the changes to friends. Mostly the response is “Hey, my kid’s getting way better grades that I did.”</p>
<p>One major flaw in this Lake Wobegon effect is that an unbroken string of A’s masks weaknesses in the student’s background at a critical point … when there is still time to address them.</p>
<p>If you think HS is too competitive, how do you think kids will deal with the real world? Life is hard, better get use to it in HS. Life isn’t fair, unfortunately, but learning resilence early will help in the future.</p>