Schools Avoid Class Ranking, Vexing Colleges

Goofy trends like this drive me nuts -- another step to dumbing down American education (this has implications far beyond college admissions):

"You're saying your grades don't matter and that you won't tell us what they mean," Mr. Shain said. "I think it's an abdication of educational responsibility."

Oh, boo hoo hoo!  Cry me a river!

"The day that we handed out numerical rank was one of the worst days in my professional life," said Margaret Loonam, a co-principal and director of guidance at Ridgewood High School, a public school in northern New Jersey that stopped telling students and colleges about class rank a decade ago. "They were sobbing. Only one person is happy when you hand out rank — the person who is No. 1."

"In a school like this, where the top 30 percent of the class is strong academically, it was unfair to all of those students who are in that elite group," Mrs. Loonam said.

Like it or not, these kids are going to be ranked their entire lives -- by high school, we should be teaching them to, at the very least, get used to it.

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Schools Avoid Class Ranking, Vexing Colleges

By ALAN FINDER

Published: March 5, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/education/05rank.html

Application files are piled high this month in colleges across the country. Admissions officers are poring over essays and recommendation letters, scouring transcripts and standardized test scores.

But something is missing from many applications: a class ranking, once a major component in admissions decisions.

In the cat-and-mouse maneuvering over admission to prestigious colleges and universities, thousands of high schools have simply stopped providing that information, concluding it could harm the chances of their very good, but not best students.

Canny college officials, in turn, have found a tactical way to respond. Using broad data that high schools often provide, like a distribution of grade averages for an entire senior class, they essentially recreate an applicant's class rank.

The process has left them exasperated.

"If we're looking at your son or daughter and you want us to know that they are among the best in their school, without a rank we don't necessarily know that," said Jim Bock, dean of admissions and financial aid at Swarthmore College.

William M. Shain, dean of undergraduate admissions at Vanderbilt University, said, "There's a movement these days to not let anybody know that a kid has done better than other kids."

Admissions directors say the strategy can backfire...