That’s sad. I saw that happen during my junior year. A kid who’d never been in advanced social studies or English classes before was suddenly plopped into my AP history class. Because his writing skills had never been refined in his English classes, he couldn’t write a proper persuasive essay for history class. I also think it was too much for him psychologically. We were supposedly the super smart kids he’d been kept from since the beginning of middle school. Now he’s supposed to pretend that none of that mattered and that the whole time he was just as smart as we were? I know that if I had been in his shoes, I would have suffered from a major inferiority complex and sabotaged myself. He didn’t make it for very long in that class, and I have always felt bad about this.
Tracking sucks, but I honestly don’t know how to fix it.
I was voted ‘most likely to go through life un-noticed’. Not really, but I should have been. I scored in the top 2% in some national test, but my grades were so-so. I’m an under-achiever. Never took HS seriously. Or anything else, I guess. I only really began my interest in learning after leaving college, half-way through. I guess higher education isn’t for everyone. At some point in college, I realized I had a library card and access to the study of anything I wished. Can’t recall if my HS ranked us. Don’t even want to know.
Based strictly on my experience, I don’t think it has much meaning.
I graduated high school with a 2.8 GPA. I wanted to be an engineer. I wasn’t accepted into engineering school, obviously. So I enrolled in college as a “general studies” student, and took all the math and physics courses I could. After the first year of college my GPA was high enough that I was accepted into the engineering school. I don’t mean to be boastful, but I now consider myself to be a pretty good engineer.
A couple years ago we hired a young engineer. He was valedictorian of his high school class. He’s been a less-than-stellar employee. He can’t think on his own, he can’t solve problems on his own, he can’t do any kind of analysis, and he seems to have zero interest in engineering. I would love to get rid of him, but he plays golf with the boss.
I didn’t think my high school did rankings, altho I vaguely recall people talking about it. I didn’t really care.
At my daughter’s high school, they had 3 honor tiers - Summa, Magna, and Cum Laude - each representing a band of GPAs. At graduation, one person from each tier gave a speech, and I think they were elected by their fellow students. It seemed like a pretty good system, except that we had to listen to 3 speeches…
In the grand scheme of things, what does it mean? Whether I was 5 or 50 or 500 in my class of 849, I was accepted to 6 colleges, I had a successful career from which I recently retired, and while I have some good memories of high school, it wasn’t that big a deal in my life. And I didn’t have to give any speeches, so I guess I wasn’t #1 or #2.
I dislike class rank because I dislike grades in general. Grades are a bizarre attempt to somehow use a single metric to measure mastery, improvement, effort, and compliance in one number and to pretend that somehow you can meaningfully compare those numbers from person to person, class to class, subject to subject, school to school. It’s silly. Furthermore, grades and rank create a system where kids (and parents and teachers, frankly) think that a number on a piece of paper is the point. So people cheat, and know that it’s wrong, but think it’s a wrong way to get a desirable result–not a empty way to achieve a meaningless symbol. People also tend to look for the lowest effort way to get the grade they want–because if the point is the grade, then the game is to find the easiest way to get it, and working harder than you need to–i,.e., learning more–is being a chump, is wasteful.
I’ve taught high school for 12 years, and I’ve always had the classes where the highest-ranked kids are concentrated. I would say that while in general the higher-ranked kids tend to be the harder working/more invested/better educated kids, it’s a very, very general relationship, and that inaccuracies in grading, rampant cheating (I cannot stress this enough), and other random factors make rank much less meaningful than people want it to be.
My high school class had about 1500 people in it. Since I was relatively bad at Spanish I had no shot at the top spot, and it didn’t bother me. However in deciding who was going to be allowed to try out for the NYC high school academic quiz program, they included SAT scores, and I made it into that group of 15.
The intense high school in our district here has multiple valedictorians - and had a scandal as several admitted to cheating because their parents pressured them so much.
Interestingly, MIT does not have class rankings nor valedictorians. Some people were nuts enough about getting 4.0s to not need any more pressure.
Is MIT unusual in this regard? Neither my undergraduate or gradate institutions had rankings or valedictorians–though they did acknowledge if you were graduating with honors, high honors, or highest honors.
MIT’s interesting twist is that the first semester is pass/fail for everyone: freshmen have time to adjust and find their feet before their grad school applications are permanently effected. I think it’s a great system.
The really top high schools around here don’t rank. I would love to get rid of it where I am: we are a competitive magnet–high enough that we get our pictures and long write-ups in Newsweek and such–so all our kids would be top at their home schools. But the district ranks, and apparently that means we can’t avoid it. So we have solid, solid kids ranked in the bottom 10% of their class.
We had them, and I was competitive academically, so it did motivate me to keep up the good work. I’m just one of those personalities that is motivated by competition. It certainly helped me to get into my college of choice as my SAT/ACT scores, while good, would most likely not have been enough on their own, but the combination of both got me in (along with the usual extracurrics.). To me, it seemed useful, as grades and college exam test scores tell you two kinds of different things, although, as noted above, there are pitfalls in assigning too much importance and accurate assessment of academic potential and work ethic to grades (and to standardized testing, for that matter.)
One of the differences between my school and the local public ones was that mine (and every other school owned by that Order) gave a sort of double grade: grade and “attitude”. While of course some teachers didn’t really bother with the attitude part, with those who did it could be helpful.
Top 15th percentile in my high school out of 400, the only people who cared were my classmates and some creepy high school counselor (who wasn’t even my counselor) cared about my class ranking. None of my employers, college professors, cared.
I could support an opt-in version, so only the people who care and/or are motivated by it are competing. By dragging in an entire student body, I think it inflates the accomlishment of ranking higher for those so motivated, and hurts those who don’t give a crap.
Unless things have changed in the mumble mumble cough 35+ years since I was a student there, MIT uses a 5.0 point scale rather than the more common 4.0 scale and pass/fail is for the entire Freshman year.
I’d guess so, but I skipped out on my two grad school graduations. I don’t remember if the schools my kids graduated from had them. No honors either at MIT.
Mine was like this. Also very high achieving, also they de-emphasized class rank as much as they possibly could. Even while we applied for college, very few people knew their rank. That kind of competitiveness (students against each other) was not part of the school’s general philosophy.
When I did go to college, I heard nightmare stories from people where class rank had been a thing - students hiding or even destroying materials that other students needed, deliberate sabotage, etc. Too much emphasis on class rank makes it so students have an incentive to make someone else do poorly (rather than just an incentive to do well themselves) and that’s a horrible environment for learning.
My high school has rankings, but they don’t mean much. The Top X% of the Juniors are ushers and flower girls at graduation and #1 Senior is Valedictorian, but that’s about it. The kids don’t even seem to obsess about it much. I know I never did in high school.
