Class rank sounds like such a simple metric - until you have to create it, or suffer under it:
With pressure coming from students and parents, administrators at many prestigious schools contend that doing away with class rank will help relieve competition within the school--and, paradoxically, help students better compete for spots at the best colleges, which want only top-ranked applicants.But though some college admissions directors support the move to dump rankings, others worry that they will lose one last check against grade inflation as A's and B's become ubiquitous.
Indeed, some B-average students will graduate in the bottom half of the Stevenson senior class. Every student in the top half--including Dieckelman, who plans to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison--has at least a 3.37 grade-point average on a 5.0 scale, a so-called weighted system that gives students extra points for the most demanding classes.
Stevenson students put so much importance on class rank that some manipulate their schedules to take classes most likely to boost their standing.
That intense competition has helped fuel the movement away from class rankings. The numbers also can become meaningless, some administrators argue, as a fraction of a decimal can separate top-ranked students. Others contend it's unfair because a 3.0 GPA at a school such as New Trier can leave a student in the bottom of the class, but at the top at a less competitive school.
I agree that at a high-ranked school, class rank isn't that informative when competitive students are separated by decimal places. Of course, there are objective measures that cut across schools, but some schools are getting rid of those as well:
At Ohio State University, which gets up to 20,000 applications a year, admissions officials say losing class rank makes it more difficult to evaluate students at a time when there is also a cry to de-emphasize standardized test scores.Posted by kswygert at June 1, 2005 03:22 PM