Class rank splits hairs, hurts many

Editorial by Kevin Griffin

An admissions office at a prestigious university receives an application from a high school senior. The student has an impressive course schedule, challenges herself in school, and participates in sports and other extracurriculars. The only problem: she is ranked 138th out of 250. How could the proud school even consider her?...

Rank hasn’t always been part of transcripts, but it has became prevalent as college admissions has become more competitive, according to Mr. Attubato. Principal Larkin thinks people just like to see rankings; teams are ranked, businesses are ranked, so why not students? Rank also is seen as a way to offset differences in difficulty and curriculum from school to school. A 3.5 GPA at an easier school doesn’t mean as much as a 3.5 at a tougher school. Rank is seen as the great equalizer.

But is it equalizing, or distorting? If students at a school tend to have low GPAs because they are weak students, rank will misleadingly inflate the transcripts of the top performers. If GPAs cluster high because students are strong, rank will artificially depress a lot of transcripts. This has happened recently at BHS. With so many seniors working harder this year, pushing for college, some saw their GPA rise and their rank plummet.

To offset this black-and-white evaluation system, some schools are adopting a new type of class-rank that tries to be more fair by being less exact. Schools such as Lexington, Concord Carlisle, Winchester, and Belmont are using a GPA “profile” instead of a basic class-rank. The profile groups close-ranking students together, much like MCAS scoring. Students ranked 1 through 10 will be in the top percentile, for example.

Mr. Larkin and Mr. Attubato say they’d like to see BHS move to GPA profiles instead of rank. Attubato’s main reasoning is that the guidance department “doesn’t want to put their students at a disadvantage.” The only problem is that class rank has been a mainstay on BHS transcripts for 30 to 40 years and not having it would involve “a big philosophical change,” Attubato says. Switching to GPA profiles would take “bringing together faculty, students, parents, the school committee, and college feedback.”

Larkin thinks the change would help mitigate the differences in rank due to differences in teachers’ grading styles. “I could take freshman English with teacher A and freshman English with teacher B and it could be completely different,” he says.

But students who defend class rank say the difference between difficult and easy teachers doesn’t make rank, or GPA, meaningless.

“Part of a measure of a student’s academic quality is his or her ability to adapt to a difficult teacher or greater workload,” says fourth-ranked Kevin Parker.

While this is a fair argument, class rank overall seems to do more harm than good. Sure, students like Kevin might benefit from having an impressive number next to their name. But do they really need it? With a high GPA and strong resume, they don’t need a ranking to prove themselves any more.

For students further down the ranking, meanwhile, the number can be a real hindrance – and an unfair one in a school of strong students, where many are forced down the order by fractions of points. Here at BHS, the difference between the student ranked number 60 and the student number 30 is just 0.2 grade points – a 3.6 vs. a 3.4.

The bottom line is that class rank is just one more number that skews the picture of a student’s true skills. BHS should either drop class rank altogether or at least take the cue of surrounding towns and use GPA percentiles instead.