<p>Our school district is eliminating class ranking, going to decile system. I think it takes effect next year, and to be quite frank, I’m not sure how they’re treating val/sal going forward. I thing we’re the third largest public school system in the country, so numberswise it’ll be big. The local belief is that class rankings bring out the worst in the students and parents, with the following anecdotes highlighting the reason for changing the practice:</p>
<p>Students taking heaping helpings of online courses to raise GPA. When the spectre of “those courses won’t be calculated toward GPA” reared its head, parents stated that they wouldn’t have their kids sign up for them - obviously these courses aren’t being taken for their intrinsic value.
Students pressuring teachers to assign extra credit work to differentiate themselves from each other; or bugging teachers to accept work performed outside the classroom to raise GPA.
One infamous student “valedictorian shopped”, transferring into another school his senior year to gain that distinction. Obviously the newly annointed salutatorian got blindsided. This was a bad biggie, but since this is an enormous system with standardized transcripts, it worked for that “highly motivated” weasel.</p>
<p>Actually, the list goes on and on, and endless! For what? For miniscule tenths of points of perceived advantage that are truly honorless. It’s the equivalent of performance enhancing drugging on the part of world class athletes. Shame on us that it’s come to this. I’m sure there’s a way to make GPA work properly, but like anything else, there are just way too many unethical students and parents who work the system. The school district probably didn’t want to painstakingly fine tune the policies and had seen other districts go in that direction so probably felt comfortable doing the same. I guess the burden will be back on the universities and colleges to decode the transcripts.</p>