<p>I was surprised to find out that my son’s high school doesn’t rank class. Do most high schools in Massachusetts not rank student’s academic performance? Is the decision to rank students largely by a particular school or by the school district?</p>
<p>Here is an article from an Illinois school discussing their decision to eliminate class rank.</p>
<p>[News</a> main Class Rank Elimination Should Benefit 207 Students - Maine Township High School District 207](<a href=“Maine Township High School District 207”>Maine Township High School District 207)</p>
<p>By the way 207 refers to their district number NOT the number of kids who will benefit!!</p>
<p>Thanks for the pointer, harvester. However, I don’t find the rationales convincing. I agree the ranking info is not intended for hard and fast rule for college Adcoms. And there are challenges in terms of how you compare ranks from one school to another in the same school district. But it’s a matter of HOW to interpret the results. Just like how to interpret a grade of A from one class/school to an A from another class/school. Therefore, the similar challenge lies in how to interpret GPA since it is always in the context of one’s class. </p>
<p>Without a doubt, there are pros and cons associated with class rank. Pros would include encouraging outstanding academic performance and pursuing excellence. A compromise way maybe only rank the top 10%, which is some schools are doing. </p>
<p>The point that ranking would result in some students choosing easy class for an easy A is invalid though. Because this can be easily fixed by using the weighted GPA in class ranks. For instance, easy A in regular class only carries the same points as a B in honor class.</p>
<p>Even though our high school doesn’t rank, it does give info in the school profile sent to all colleges that gives an indication of where one’s gpa ranks one in relation to the rest of the class. So it will indicate that 98 gpa and above is top 5%, 95 is top 10%, 92% is top 25% and that top 50% is 88%. (An approximation) </p>
<p>This gives enough info to colleges without getting caught up in the number ranks that can have distinctions of .01 %.</p>
<p>I think that the guidance counselor letter will indicate in it if you are one of the top 5 ranked students too.</p>
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<p>Yes and no.</p>
<p>A HS senior taking say, a fourth year of Orchestra for a sixth or seventh class would see their rank go down even with an “A” since Orchestra is generally not weighted like an AP. Or, a student taking an 8th elective class for fun, would also see his/her rank drop even with an A. (As they say, unintended consequences…)</p>
<p>I read in the LA Times a few years ago, that most California high schools do not rank, but I have not seen that in print since.</p>
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<p>My D’s IB high school doesn’t rank. Yet somehow, her fellow graduates did well enough to end up in places like Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Notre Dame, Rice, Emory, etc.</p>
<p>@LasMa, although my son’s school doesn’t rank, there are a dozen students out of 460 students go to ivies or ivy caliber schools every year. </p>
<p>But a larger and more interesting question is should schools rank high school students? I see more pros than cons while others may see more cons than pros.</p>
<p>@bluebayou, you have a good point on taking a less rigorous class for easy A…even both have the same rigor (e.g. honors class) on paper.</p>
<p>Our high school gave up ranking a long time ago. Kids spent too much time fighting over 0.01 of a point to move up in rank. And yet, kids from this school get into the top schools all the time (graduation rate is 98%, 4 year college rate is over 80%). </p>
<p>Whether to rank or not is decided by school district - if there’s more than one high school in a district, either all rank or none do.</p>
<p>High schools have academic reputations with many colleges. Given the number of top schools in the Northeast, I’m not surprised that MA high schools have dropped ranking. Harvard, Yale, MIT, Dartmouth, BC, BU, etc. admissions officers know which are the top performing high schools in MA. They know a kid with a good GPA from a top MA public school will do well, regardless of whether he’s ranked 1, 4, or 32. It may be different for schools in, say, North Dakota, which may not be as well-known to admissions officers, and they may need the extra “push” that ranking may give.</p>
<p>When you get to dicing and splicing by minutae for 1, 2, 3 ranks, the differences become statistically insignificant and merely raise the students’ stress levels.</p>
<p>Our school only ranks the top 10% and it is based upon the weighted GPA. That is the only fair way to do it. Weights are different for normal, honors, AP and IB classes like most schools. Getting an “A” in an AP class adds more points to your GPA than an “A” in band or sports which is a regular class. Ranking only the top 10% is pretty common in our area, at least for the more competitive and challenging high schools. It has helped kids get into better colleges that were not top 10%. </p>
<p>Most colleges will look at the high school profile, the student’s GPA and course rigor and can determine a fairly accurate rank for each applicant from the non-ranking school. In a way it really doesn’t matter to a college if the high school ranks or not. If a kid was ranked at the 25th percentile by a high school that ranks and that same student and high school went to non-ranking I would assume the college would probably rank him around the same 25th percentile using the high school profile and weighted GPA.</p>
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<p>What pros? You and I both demonstrated that a school doesn’t need to rank in order to produce top students, and that students don’t need ranks as motivation.</p>
<p>If you look at Section C10 of the Common Data Set for any given college, it shows the breakdown of class rankings admitted to the freshman class and also the percentage of students who submitted class rank. Harvard for example only had 60% submitting class rank. So it is a majority but not an overwhelming one.
At the larger high schools around here the top students have GPAs that differ by thousandths of a point. It gets a little crazy.</p>
<p>@LasMa, how about I say the biggest pro is to prep students, especially high school students, for the real life? Many companies rank and rate employees. For instance, the company I am working for rates everyone twice a year and HR knows who is in the top 10% and who is in the bottom 10%. I don’t think I am telling you something new. </p>
<p>No matter how imperfect ranking method is, it still has some values. How to take the info itself could be an invaluable lesson for the high schoolers.</p>
<p>Actually, that is new to me. I’ve never worked for a company which ranked employees, and have never personally heard of that. Not saying it doesn’t exist, just that it’s not a good enough reason to continue the tradition of HS ranking, which IMO is largely anachronistic.</p>
<p>Ranking isn’t the same thing as evaluating. Every year, my boss evaluates me in a formal setting, to let me how I’m doing. And they do rate me on certain criteria – 9 on this aspect of my job, 8 on that aspect. That tells me how well I’m living up to their standards. But they do not tell me that I’m in the top 10%. In other words, they do not measure me against other employees, or rank me. They measure me against their expectations of my performance. </p>
<p>Isn’t it your experience that employees usually know how they’re doing anyway, for good or ill? Do you really need a percentage label to know what your boss thinks of your work? </p>
<p>A kid who excels in HS is probably not going to start slacking once he’s out from under the ranking threat. An achiever in HS will generally be an achiever in college and beyond.</p>
<p>^^ Most big companies do rank employees as part of talent management but they may not announce it publicly. The methodologies may vary from one to another but some sort of percentile is used in ranking. So as part of the eval process in many companies, especially big companies, ratings are given based on performance. Ratings are curved! In many eval I have been through (I have been on both the receiving and giving side), HR knows who is the top 10% performer and who is the bottom 10% performer. When some need to let people go, they will cut the bottom (also fact in seniority among other things). I have worked for many fortune 500 firms as employee and consultant in the past 20 years. Seems you are not familiar with this process. Small companies may not do this because it’s easy to manage. </p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with schools that don’t rank students no. 1,2,3…because like many commented here it gets crazy when 0.01 difference in GPA makes a big deal. But some sort of ranking in percentiles is not only necessary but also helpful, not just to colleges (which is a less concern to me actually) but to parents. As a parent, I don’t know how my son is performing relative to his peers. Is he the top 5%, or 10%? or 50%? I don’t know and I don’t have an accurate and objective view of his performance. Lack of transparency is the biggest con in my opinion.</p>
<p>Tiger dad, as I mentioned earlier, schools have school profiles that are sent to colleges. Get a copy of yours.</p>
<p>In my district it shows broad percentiles instead of exact rank, # of AP classes, method used for weighting classes, etc.</p>
<p>It is enough info for any college to determine the type of high school environment and where a student places in it, even without exact rank.</p>
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<p>Should not be surprised. Most schools dont.</p>
<p>And there is a very good reason not to.</p>
<p>A student, for example, is ranked 30th in their class. Seems like a big difference.
But if one looks at the GPAs of the graduating seniors, the difference between number one and number thirty could be only a few thousandths of a point. The measured numerical difference is too small to be significant.</p>
<p>Or use baseball as an analogy.
One player has a .305 batting average. Another players average is .304. Would you really say player A is a better hitter than player B?</p>
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Our high school lists the GPAs that make up the top 10%, top 20%, etc. all the way down to the bottom. The colleges (or parents if they choose) can place their students into those deciles. But the high school won’t tell anyone where a student with a particular GPA falls within that decile. Say, for example, the top 10% is 3.7-4.0. Your student has a 3.8. That tells you that the student is in the top 10%, but it doesn’t tell you that your student is the only student with 3.8 and everyone else in the top 10% is 3.85 or higher. Or that only one student has a 4.0 and that most have 3.7.</p>
<p>That’s the difference between deciles and ranking.</p>
<p>^^ i guess we are saying the same thing. deciles and centiles are basically tiered rankings. many schools don’t even use that.</p>
<p>btw, is your school in MA?</p>
<p>@GolfFather, i agree the exact ranking is too much and may not be meaningful. but not ranking at all isn’t the right approach either. a tiered ranking system, such as the one uskoolfish and Chedva talked about, makes more sense.</p>