<p>You will want to read the full text article, but the gist is that something like 40% of high schools no longer provide ranking info to colleges, but this might end up hurting some students:
[quote]
Mr. Shain of Vanderbilt said an internal review showed that the admission rate at Vanderbilt was highest for students with a class rank and lowest for those whose schools provided neither a rank nor general data about grades.<a href=“My%20guess%20is%20that%20it%20hurts%20the%20students%20who%20would%20have%20been%20top-ranked,%20but%20probably%20shelters%20many%20kids%20who%20aren’t%20%20-%20so%20basically,%20if%20your%20kid%20is%20class%20valedictorian,%20you%20want%20ranking,%20if%20your%20kid%20isn’t%20even%20in%20the%20top%2010%…%20you%20definitely%20don’t%20want%20it.”>/quote</a></p>
<p>“(My guess is that it hurts the students who would have been top-ranked, but probably shelters many kids who aren’t - so basically, if your kid is class valedictorian, you want ranking, if your kid isn’t even in the top 10%… you definitely don’t want it.)”</p>
<p>I think it’s more complicated than that. In a small school with a large high achieving group or in a selective public school I think class rankings can be very deceiving. In my high school the graduating class had less than 80 students. We had 6 kids go to Harvard, 8 to Yale, and 2 to Princeton. The top 10% of the class had more than 20% of the students. We had no rankings or even honors courses, but our GPAs were available. I’m a bit dubious of rankings. I suspect they are more accurate in the school my son attends with over 3000 kids, but the weighting system doesn’t give AP courses more weight than honors and no credit at all is given if he goes outside the system and takes a class at a local college.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, class rank isn’t figured in for home schoolers. Colleges have managed to evaluate students without it. Our congressman required it (for nominations for academies) so we put down 1/1. I guess they figured it out! In my dd’s case, it would have been meaningless anway–her last year and a half was spent at college. At our public school, our top-ranked students for years haven’t been able to get into their first choice college–valedictorian doesn’t mean much here…</p>
<p>my daughters private prep school didn’t rank or weight- 18 students in her graduating class- but as far as I know, everyone got into where they wanted.
younger daughters urban public does rank but doesn’t weight- I suppose this might go against her because she isn’t going to have as good of grades as she would if she was taking regular classes rather than AP, but I imagine that the schools that she will apply to, will notice that she is taking AP.
Big universities that sort applications by GPA and test scores though- not so good.</p>
<p>“At our public school, our top-ranked students for years haven’t been able to get into their first choice college–valedictorian doesn’t mean much here…”</p>
<p>Same here. Only with very rare exceptions) athletes get into HYPS from my town. The deal is that upper middle class and wealthy parents don’t like the thought that little Johnie’s class rank doesn’t match his parents’ income. Inevitably (where we are) it is these parents who agitate for getting rid of class rank.</p>
<p>Doesn’t matter, though. Wherever they end up, whether it be Swarthmore or Podunk, 50% of the students will end up in the bottom half of the class.</p>
<p>Our school doesn’t weight grades, but provides approximate rankings to colleges by GPA deciles (e.g., 3.7 - 4.0 = top 10%). IMHO, it’s the worst of both worlds. Since grades aren’t weighted, a kid who has taken all college prep courses could be ranked higher than a kid who has taken all honors and APs. I made a plea to our principal last year to drop any semblance of ranking altogether rather than use this misleading system, and I understand the school board is now looking into the issue.</p>
<p>My take on this has not varied much since I started reading about this subject: the absence of ranking does not hurt students who do not need the ranking but does not acomplish much for the majority and DOES hurt the top students who attend schools that play smoke and mirrors games. </p>
<p>Who are the students who do not need a ranking system? Students who attend prestigious schools with established relationships with a number of schools or a feeder’s recognition. Such school could adopt ANY kind of system and end up doing as well in admissions. </p>
<p>Who gets hurt? Students who attend wannabe schools that erroneously believe that if the practice pays dividends for the “big boys” if will work for them also. Making the true performance of students only renders the job of adcoms more difficult. Nebulous records does not help anyone. </p>
<p>Who is responsible? The responsibility falls squarely on misguided school offcials mostly because they cave in to the pressure of … misinformed parents who tend to believe their school is a new version of Lake Wobegon’s.</p>
<p>PS While I agree that the example of homeschoolers may support the abolition of ranking systems, I also believe that a counterpoint comes from the fact that many schools expect GREATER details of the curriculum of homeschooled students or may ask a series of standardized to support their background.</p>
<p>I still think that the schools SHOULD provide parents with full ranking, as well as weighted and unweighted transcripts, and let THEM decide which fits their purposes the best.</p>
<p>Back in the 70’s (a few years after I had Graduated) my High School got the Bright Idea to report “Class Rank” in a way that could lead to 20% of the students being in the “Top 10% of Class Ranks”.</p>
<p>It went like this: in a class of 400 students each GPA was ranked.
ie:
3 students got 100% = rank #1
4 students got 99.5% = rank #2 (not rank #4 as you would expect)
2 students got 99% = rank #3 (not rank #8 )
6 students got 98.5% = rank #4 ( not rank #10 )
4 students got 98% = rank #5 (not rank #16)
this continued on thru the class so that the lowest GPA of 75% was ranked #199 “in a class of 400”.</p>
<p>This “Class Rank” appeared on Transcripts without clarification of what it really meant.
Thus all the students could be “Above Average”
Of course they were “less than clear” describing in how they arrived at the rankings - and they justified it by saying “It will help our students in College admissions”</p>
<p>I can’t imagine it fooled any Admissions Officers for long, especially if two or three of the #4’s applied to a College and a couple of the #5’s did also. The College would see immediately what was really going on.</p>
<p>I went to a high school that not only had no class ranking, it had no grades. It was very liberating - definitely a positive in terms of the high school educational experience. And it didn’t seem to hurt college admissions either. (This was a public, non-competitive admissions school.)</p>
<p>I know there is a high school in New York (St. Ann’s) that does not give grades and has a stellar college placement record. In fact, I think it was at the top of the chart that the Wall Street Journal did a couple of years ago. But it’s a private, competitive admissions school, so maybe hard to use it as an example for most schools.</p>
<p>In any event, I think the case for getting rid of class ranking - or for the more extreme step of getting rid of grades altogether - should be based on improving the high school education (and reducing or eliminating non-constructive incentives). It would be nice if we could recover some element of high school as an end in itself, rather than just a means to the college prize.</p>
<p>My kid’s school does not rank, and it does not appear to harm admissions. But they do provide quintiles or deciles (can’t remember which) and a very detailed profile. They are not aiming quite as high as some schools on this forum, the top ten to 20 percent apply to “selective colleges” - that is colleges that require an essay, and the top 5% do very well - in the past 5 years they have had Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Vandy, Rice, a Yale about 7 years ago.
It helped my daughter, because she wasn’t val or sal.</p>
<p>My kid’s school ranks even with graduating classes less than 25. It is just one piece of the pie so to speak. Why not? I think students need to be able to evaluate themselves using rank, gpa, talents, and the like when making their own decisions about where they fit in the college process. Why not? </p>
<p>We’ve had two kids go to Yale in the past 10 years. One was “top of the top” and Yale wrote to our head about sending more of that type of student. So we did. The second claimed after her first year to be at the bottom of the bottom, took a year off, adjusted and has done very well in the long term with graduate studies at Cambridge and beyond. I wonder about the second one though, who went in on the coattails of the first. Would that student have done better to have found a school where they would have felt to at least be in the middle of the pile when they began their studies?</p>
<p>Back to rank. There is a reason for having to be admitted. It is the way it is. There is no point in trying to “game” a system that is trying to fill schools with kids who can succeed and give the institutions a good name in the process. Why try for the “Ivy League” unless you are at the top, top of your class. There are so many great schools out there and some I am beginning to learn do just as good a job if not better than some of the “brand name” schools.</p>
<p>The problem with ranking is that kids take courses based on achieving the highest possible rank. If classes aren’t weighted, some kids will take the easiest possible courses to get a high ranking. If you weight APs, a lot of kids will take “elective” type APs instead of the basics–say skip physics and take AP Enviromental Science or AP psych instead. And, too many times the weighting system does discourage kids from taking college courses, which often are not weighted. I’ve even heard of schools where taking band or drama or some such course IN ADDITION TO regular courses depresses your ranking, because those courses aren’t weighted and the school just divides the total number of points by the number of classes taken. </p>
<p>If all kids at the same high school took the same courses taught by the same teachers, ranking would make sense. But deciding that student A is valedictorian because he has a .02 higher GPA than student B, when they took different courses taught by different teachers doesn’t make much sense. </p>
<p>To me, the system that makes sense–and it is used by some private schools–is giving the grades in each course along with the grade distribution in each course. So, while there’s no rank, the college can see that Tom got the highest grade of all the 25 students in his physics class, the highest grade in his math class, the 3rd highest grade in his English class, etc. This satisfies the need of a college to get some context which makes a grade understandable without leading a kid to take AP stats rather than BC calculus or to avoid starting a second foreign language (which won’t be weighted as an AP) to keep his or her class rank intact. Kids won’t avoid taking courses from the hardest grading teachers because the colleges will SEE that the teacher is a hard grader from the grade distribution statistics. </p>
<p>Add that in with a good school profile and I think the “problem” is solved.</p>
<p>The problem with ranking is that kids take courses based on achieving the highest possible rank. If classes aren’t weighted, some kids will take the easiest possible courses to get a high ranking.
Well some might I suppose but they would be doing themselves a disservice.
Which would better prepare you for college courses- AP classes or higher GPA?
While my Ds urban public school doesn’t weight grades, which results in as many as 40 valedictorians, they still have a goodly number taking AP courses for 4 years in high school including calc BC.
Since many want to attend top schools, they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn’t take the most challenging courses that were available and appropriate</p>
<p>I agree that class ranking can be difficult and may have little meaning. S’s HS had, I believe, 44 valedictorians. If a student had 1 B they were not in the top 10%. So a student who took mostly AP and honors classes who received a B, would be ranked far lower than a straight A student who did not take such a challenging curriculum (no weighting). Rank in this case was not very helpful in describing a student’s abilities or achievement.</p>
<p>And taking the hardest course load is one of the most important features that schools examine. SAT, GPA, RANK, COURSES are at the top. Competition is good if students know themselves. That is the key. In college selection these things can help students judge themselves by criteria from an outside perspective. They can chose schools where they fit, not where their parents want them or they would like to attend.</p>
<p>Of course, the other things like talent, location, etc can tip the scales. But the foundation of the type of student they are is laid by gpa, rank, sat, course load.</p>
<p>Rank on its own would be a disaster. I agree. But taken in combination with the other 3 attributes create a picture of each student. Schools getting rid of rank are only serving their own interests and not those of their students.</p>
<p>My sons high school managed to have their cake and eat it too by not ranking but still maintaining a val and sal. [One of each. 44 vals! Idad, thats outrageous.] This contradiction never really made sense to me as I thought that they should either rank everyone or no one. </p>
<p>My son was in the category of those who benefited from the non-rank; there were a lot of smart accomplished kids at this school and although he was (is) bright enough, his GPA put him in the second decile. I didnt see his counselors report but I understand that their practice was to present students relative standing in a positive context (by which I mean they fudged a bit).</p>
<p>Our suburban, highly competitive public high school eliminated the publication of exact rank perhaps four years ago. We still use weighted GPA. The results have been IMO positive.</p>
<p>There has been no discernible change in our college admissions. There is also no discernible interest in our community to return to exact class rank.</p>
<p>Our school routinely divulges decile rank to colleges. The school will divulge even more, privately, if required for scholarship applications (e.g. top 5 percent). They will not divulge exact class rank because a college requests or “requires” it.</p>
<p>We have no val or sal. There is a process to choose speakers for graduation. Kids apply, write a draft speech and are interviewed by the administration. I think speakers must be in the top half or fourth of the class.</p>
<p>I do not know if kids can request their class rank for any reason but I am inclined to doubt it since that would defeat one of the purposes of the change.</p>
<p>To me, exact class rank was unhelpful because it created an inducement for kids to struggle, strategize and make course selections for the sake of hundreths of a point in GPA. For example, in one well-publicized case in our state, a student was (suspiciously, in the eyes of many) medically excused from gym and therefore was able to fit another, higher weighted course into her schedule and thus earn a slightly higher GPA than her peers, who were required to take gym. Such differences in GPA IMO are not meaningful indicators of difference in performance, ability, or future success in life. I would rather see kids devote their energies in other, more constructive directions.</p>
<p>My sons’ Jesuit high school eliminated rank several years ago. They provide no grade distribution information to colleges. They felt it was unfair to be 20th at their school and 20th at the public school across town; they didn’t feel they were comparable. They also had an issue with pitting kids against each other.</p>
<p>I couldn’t care less either way. The boys at this school are a very tight bunch - so maybe it’s better that isn’t in their face. They get into good schools, including Ivies.</p>