That cumulative honor roll is ridiculous. Class rank is also misleading. Hopefully college admissions totally ignores such designations, given what I’ve seen here. Son’s school had gpa for the semester honor/high honor roll. Gifted kid did not always get A’s- young and when bored did not always do all of the work et al- especially when he became a senior slacker. I once wondered about class rank and asked a HS teacher about it when a student I knew was in special ed got high honors. He told me that the student would not displace other, regular, students in class rankings when it came to senior year. I also totally gave up on the meaning of the student selected from each HS by the local paper when son’s year the girl was not as good as others academically (knew from son and the other NM finalist) but amassed large numbers of volunteer hours.
Thank goodness HS becomes ancient history. And colleges do their own evaluations of information sent. Yes, it was fine to have honor rolls published and likely an incentive for students to do well. But times change and the local newspaper readership keeps declining. It is bad when states use such measures for giving merit aid and admissions. Texas comes to mind. I also think it is bad for school districts (Indiana and others?) to give different diplomas based on the academic track done. Some students mature into being college bound but won’t get the same diploma based on their HS start.
“I am thinking at this time that all of those extra qualifiers for high school honors are unnecessary.”
Honestly, I’d suggest this be “I am thinking at this time that high school honors are unnecessary.” Our HS has the same cutoffs you suggested but it’s based on weighted GPA. So 55% of the senior class is in Highest Honors and 82% are Honors of some sort. And no one looks at it.
If one is needed… I certainly think weighted GPA should be used. Taking more challenging courses should be encouraged. (“committing to academic excellence“). My HS didn’t, so our valedictorian was someone no one in our AP/honors student group knew. She had a 4.0 with standard courses whereas my best friend had 4 APs senior year and got one B one grading period (but he went to Harvard, she went to a local mediocre school, so…).
Club participation, attendance? Pfftt. Number of honors/AP/etc. are taken care of by weighting. And “no grade below X” is probably also covered, though I can see at C cutoff.
Weighting is always a challenge. We’ve been through a couple over the last few years. Right now, AP, dual college enrollment and honors courses are weighted 4:3:2. Each 9-week grading period of AP adds .02 to the weighted GPA.
One recent change I do like is a cap on added weighting for a year. In the past students have gone to extremes in a GPA/Val race. I know this year’s Val says he took 17 AP courses. Cyber/on-line, including over the summer, of easier AP courses doesn’t benefit anyone.
D is a freshman and in the first class under the new rules, whee they are capped at 6 AP worth of credit Jr and Sr years, and less in earlier years. (I’m ok with the 6, though she is losing points freshman year by being advanced and taking one AP, one college, and 4 honors - I don’t think that’s excessive)
Incidentally, even if your kid’s high school doesn’t report class rank, it does exist.
Has any kid at your kid’s school applied to a service academy? If they have, that’s your proof that class rank exists. The service academies require class rank as part of the application.
I read Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards ( https://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-Praise/dp/0618001816 ) back when my kids were in elementary school and thought he made some pretty compelling arguments. My kids never seemed particularly incentivized by awards in any case. My oldest had scheduling conflicts that meant he took a regular physics section freshman year instead of honors, and then Latin unlike all the other languages only had honors weighting in Year 4. So he lost a few places in the ranking. FWIW our school weighted grades, with exactly the same weight for AP or honors which seemed weird to me. I think the report cards said if you were on the honor roll or high honor roll, but we never paid any attention. They ranked all the students, but did the calculation only once in October of senior year.
I went to a school that did not believe in honors or ranking. We seemed to work hard. I remember the school did say they tell school’s if you were in the top 10%, 25% or 50% of the class. A lot more than 10% of us got into Ivy league colleges.
My kids go to a magnet school that doesn’t provide class rank unless the student is in the top percentiles that allow automatic admissions in Texas. The school does provide a letter stating that students in this magnet school are already in the top 8% of the district.
In terms of GPA, our guidance counselors told us how GPA is calculated at our high school. They also stressed that many colleges would recalculate GPA based on their preferred method. So, some colleges only look at core classes. Some drop freshman grades. Some will weight AP classes but not community college classes.
So, when it comes down to it, what the high school decides may not matter all that much. The college may look at the high school demographic, types of classes taken, and give their own ranking.
That may be the case where the AP course is just the appropriate level of the honors sequence (e.g. where AP foreign language is level 4 of the honors sequence, or AP calculus BC follows the previous honors math courses).
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. At one point there were both honors and AP Physics courses for example. And I believe that part 2 of Global Studies (NYS required course) could be either honors or AP World. And of course there are a bunch of stand alone APs.
The service academies impute a class rank based on school profiles and other factors for applicants coming from schools that do not rank. Schools that do not rank are not secretly providing a rank to any institution that “requires” them.
Our high school won’t report rank to colleges, but they do have Val/Sal. We’re going to sit through graduation watching another child give the Val speech because even though my child had higher % grades than the Val, they calculate using the A, B, C scale, not the % grade. So a 93% is the same as a 100% (an A is an A) but much better than a 92.6 (which happens to be what my child got in one of his AP classes, versus the 98% and 99%s he got in his other 5 AP classes). Needless to say I’d prefer they do away with the system.
I can understand eliminating rank & Val/Sal since such a system really encourages gaming (‘I can’t take honors orchestra bcos it’ll kill my GPA’). So eliminating rank is a good thing. Just report deciles to colleges, if asked/needed.
However, not sure what the purpose of your suggested rankings are, OP. With a large contingent of kids already going to college, do the students really care? I mean, for these kids, what’s the point?
OTOH, think about the kids not going to direct to any college. Our HS, with ~80% of kids going to college, just has an Honor Roll at 3.0 (academic classes only). Obviously, the college bound kids could care less; the top kids don’t even add it to their ‘resume’…
But, I remember the families with special needs kids and those with real learning disabilities and how proud those kids and parents were when they made Honor Roll senior year. They were just beaming at graduation, like they’d just won the lottery. As another parent, I felt proud on their behalf.
S’s magnet HS had no class rank and no val/sal. However he did know approximately which percentile he fell into.
D’s HS (local public) ranked. Honors classes were weighted and AP had additional weighting. Val/Sal and top 10 were recognized. The local education foundation sponsored a banquet for all of the students in each of the district’s public HS’s who were in the top 5% of the class.
I didn’t have any issues with the way it was done (full disclosure: D was in the top 10, though not val or sal). In my child’s case she took 2 unweighted electives Senior year knowing that would pull her GPA down. She knew all of the other students in the top 10 and guess what - all of them did the same. (these were classes such as chorus/band/art/newspaper/yearbook/drama, etc). Maybe that was an unusual group of kids, but there wasn’t evidence of “grade grubbing” to me.
If class rank reported for college applications is that at the end of junior year, then the students do not need to rank grub in their senior year course choices for colleges using class rank.
Is it normal practice to use class rank as of the end of junior year for college applications?
Our public HS does not report rank nor calculate deciles. The school profile has a bar graph showing the number of students that fall in each range of .33 on a weighted scale, as of the 6th semester. When I once asked if this is a disservice to the tippy top students, I was told ‘don’t worry, if a child is at the top the guidance counselor makes sure that is expressed .’ I’m not exactly sure what that means; perhaps the gc includes this distinction in their LOR.
Our school weighs Honors or AP with an extra 0.5 (except if there is both Honors and AP in a subject, in that case Honors gets 0.25.) And because there are several unweighted classes required for graduation that everyone must take, it is impossible to achieve a perfect 4.5 cum GPA. This makes it difficult to compare against other schools where I see people reporting GPA’s such as 4.7.
For colleges that do admission evaluation and notification before any high school record after junior year is available, any use of class rank (or other things in or derived from high school record like grades or GPA) can only consider that as of the end of junior year.
For example, University of Texas has application deadlines of 11/1 or 12/1 and says that “Applicants should submit transcripts indicating rank for the latest completed semester prior to the application deadline.” https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/freshman-admission
D2’s high school weights AP courses very modestly and recognizes the top decile, but with no val or sal.
I have heard of weighting systems that make no sense to me - like taking a GPA hit for taking marching band or art as opposed to a study hall. Or having to forego lunch for an additional class to ensure a higher rank. I understand the impetus in states like Texas where percentile rank is crucial to public university outcomes. But it still makes me sad.
I like schools where the senior class votes on class graduation speakers. My class Val was brilliant…but he was not a good public speaker…at all. Luckily he knew that and his remarks were brief. But I’ve been at graduations where the Val or Sal speeches were not particularly terrific, and in one case we knew the Val who really didn’t want to speak at graduation…but was told he had to. He too was brief.
At some schools, students toss their name in the hat for the vote, and the senior class elects their graduation class speakers. I like this better than tying this to being Val or Sal.
I wish my kids’ school would do this. They still rank, and the top 20 are recognized at graduation and get to sit up front. My daughter stressed a lot about this and ended up 18th out of 474, barely making the cut with a 4.7 GPA. It’s crazy how competitive some of these schools are.
I agree the top 20 should be recognized but at graduation IMO not a good idea. Kids at ours get their pictures in the hallway, an honors breakfast with a chosen teacher, a recognition with parents at night, and District recognition on website. As to speakers at graduation I’m not sure how it done but I think its picked by administration partly to prevent a bad speaker.
What difference does it make where the student sits at graduation? Front, middle, back? What difference.
The only front seating at our HS graduations…were the speakers. Top 10 students had a * next to their names in the program. They were recognized at a Board of Education meeting about two weeks before graduation. Just the students, families, BOE members, and administration. They had a nice little reception and that was perfect.
In this situations where students “applied” to be grad speakers, and the class voted, the applicants had to submit a draft of their speech first.
I’m not sure the administration at our school would know who is a good speaker and who isn’t!