Tufts declines to 29th in rankings

[Mastadon]

@aegis400 @dawala282

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post back in the fall of 2015 about the trend of high schools eliminating class rank and its implications on college admissions.

Interestingly, no mention was made of the implications of its use in, and the validity of, college rankings.

At this time, it was reported that:
20% of Tufts applicants supplied class rank.
33% of Dartmouth’s class of 2018 supplied class rank
44% of Swarthmore’s admitted class supplied class rank.

It would be hard to build a credible argument that a statistic that applies to a small minority of applicants is meaningful. I suspect that this is why Tufts chose to stop tracking it. I also suspect that Tufts did not consider the implications of not tracking the data on its’ US News ranking.

In terms of not reporting the data for the class of 2021, it is important to recognize that the the US News ranking is based on data from two years earlier. This means that last fall’s ranking came out after the admissions data was collected for the class of 2021, so the class of 2022 (this year’s admissions class) would be the first opportunity to reverse the decision based on knowledge of the impact on rankings.

I have no knowledge of whether or not Tufts decided to collect class rank data this year, but one could argue that the “correct” thing to do would be to de-emphasize the metric in the USNews rank given that fewer and fewer high schools are ranking students, and it is losing relevance.

College admissions officers said they have seen a steep drop-off in the number of applicants who come from schools that rank students. At Tufts University in Boston, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Lee Coffin said just 20 percent of the students who applied this year provided a class rank. And Jim Bock, vice president and dean of admissions at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, said many more applicants are coming from high schools with unorthodox ranking systems that make little sense. How can every member of a class be ranked in the top 50 percent? And how can a student earn the No. 1 rank when another student at the same school has a higher GPA?

Coffin said admissions officers are now left without a useful data point that can help them judge a student in the context of his or her school. Without rank information, Coffin said test scores play a larger role, since grades can be an unfair measure given some schools — and some teachers — grade far more rigorously than others. He referred to a “traffic jam” at the top: because so many students have super-high GPAs, it’s difficult to distinguish one from the other.

“It’s disappearing as a metric,” Coffin said. “Then the subject testing and the standardized testing helps break that traffic jam.”

The news release for Swarthmore College’s recently admitted class acknowledged that just 44 percent of students were ranked — and of those a third were valedictorians or salutatorians. Dartmouth College’s Class of 2018 profile also lists statistics about how many of its students were top-ranked in high school, but with a notation that only a third of students came from schools that provide it. At Tufts, Coffin said the university gradually will start phasing out any mention of rank in its marketing materials because just a fraction of students are ranked.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/07/13/high-schools-are-doing-away-with-class-rank-what-does-that-mean-for-college-admissions/?utm_term=.32df7f6f881d