@wis75 perhaps in this case “class” can be interpreted to mean “ranking within a specific class” (i.e. calculus, history etc.) and not “students who start as freshmen the same fall term.”
DS19 was offered a small conditional award for next year from one department based on his performance in the introductory first semester course. Students don’t declare their majors until the end of the winter semester so the award offer acts as incentive for a promising student to declare that department as their major (luckily for him it is the department he was planning on declaring any way). All the students in the introductory course class were ranked by their performance to determine who they wanted to try “recruiting” by offering conditional awards.