One year I was ranked #69 in a class of 666. I saved that printout.
The next year I moved up and the class got larger and there was no more idle amusement for me.
Yeah, at my school there was none of this. I was competitive about it, and so were a couple others, but not obsessive. We all helped each other out with homework, tests, and the such. It was fun, friendly competition. I didn’t get the sense anyone took it THAT seriously. We just knew that it helped to get into college.
I went to a fairly prestigious Jesuit high school, and practically all of the boys who went there HAD been the smartest kids in their elementary schools. So, as freshmen, we were all very competititve and were constantly trying to figure out where we stood.
The school didn’t make it easy, as they never ranked us. But that didn’t stop us from TRYING to rank ourselves.
By sophomore year, nobody cared. We had a rough idea who the handful of REALLY elite guys were (no, I wasn’t one of them), but since they were all genuinely nice guys, nobody was terribly jealous. When they wound up at Harvard Law School or studying human genomes at Stanford, we were HAPPY for them.
After a year of obsessing, most of us quit worrying about anything but doing the best WE could.
The college I went to had a small scholarship if you were the valedictorian, which at my high school was selected strictly on GPA. I had the exact same grades and honors classes as the #1 at my school, but with an additional class in the mix (0 hour jazz band) lessening the effect of the weighted honors classes, I came out 2nd. I was pretty upset at the time, and felt like the school was taking money out of my pocket by not letting me retroactively drop the credits from the extra class.
Almost 30 years later, my pockets are still affected by arbitrary competition. Every year we get our annual evaluations, get scored 1-5 in 5 different categories, and the boss divies up X% of raises to all of his underlings weighted by the sum of the scores.
“Deserve” is not an inherently quantifiable concept, so we make up somewhat arbitrary systems to approximate who deserves what. That’s life, and it might as well be learned early.
I was 3rd in my class behind the two co-valedictorians that had straight As. I got one A- in shop class. Our school also did not weight classes. An A in gym class was the same as an A in AP Calculus. I took more honors classes than one of the valedictorians and probably would’ve ranked ahead of him in a weighted system. However, I was totally fine with ranking third. It saved me from having to give the awkward high school graduation speech.
Class rankings are vitally important and define you as a person for the rest of your life. If you are ranked 75th and your friend Jim is 76th, you are clearly a better person than your friend Jim.
My HS certainly did class rankings, but I don’t recall anyone making any big deal about them. One thing they were used for was deciding whether you were allowed to take AP courses. 1953 was the first year of them as an experiment. Someone in the top 5% could take 4 AP courses and someone in the next 5% could take 2 of them. As a result I was not allowed to take AP calculus, so I enjoyed solid geometry instead. In retrospect, I was probably better off. As it happened, I was reading something about AP calculus just yesterday and the comment was made that students coming from AP calculus could find the derivative of a product, but had no idea of what the derivative means. My experience confirms this. They think they learned calculus but all they learned was some cookbook formulas.
But I digress. HS rankings were important for scholarships, of which I got none. In those days, there were no need-based scholarships and my class ranking (and–to be honest–good but not stellar SATs, around 1300) left up a creek with no scholarship. But it eventually worked out, although that is a long story.
I was valedictorian of my graduating class. It was not something I consciously aimed for; at my high school the rankings were based solely on GPA, and I guess I just got good grades.
It was a mixed blessing. Although I wasn’t striving for the top spot the girl who ended up being salutatorian certainly was, and she was pretty embittered that I “beat” her. She was also more popular than me, and while no one was ever mean to me about it, I did become aware of the controversy and it was awkward/unpleasant for a while. At one point I told my parents I was thinking about giving up the honor so that she could have it, but they told me I was being ridiculous.
On the plus side, when all was said and done it was a cool honor to have, I got to make a speech at graduation, and I’m sure it didn’t hurt when it came to college admissions.
Who the top student is matters for purposes of commencement speechifying. Once we get past that, it’s just bragging rights. Where, precisely, one might do such bragging and not immediately be a target of mockery remains unknown.
My Gymnasium (1970s/1980s Germany) didn’t have class rankings, and to my knowledge it’s still a pretty alien concept in Germany, grades being considered personal information that aren’t others’ business.
My high school did it, but nobody really cared.
I’m all for it. It’s a much more competitive world out there than it was when we were young. Our kids are competing with the best and brightest from around the world, and I promise you kids in China and India have been ranked from the moment they stepped in to pre-school. I think we need to keep room for creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit, but it doesn’t hurt us to raise the standards a bit.
My school (a small Anglican diocesan school in South Africa) didn’t put out a ranking, per se, but the classes were small (about 30-40 per grade) and the results weren’t treated as strictly confidential, so it was easy enough to know basically where you were relative to the class. At the end of the year there were prizes (books, generally) awarded to (IIRC) the top three in each grade. In the final year it was a proper trophy cup (which had to be handed back the next year).
Personally I felt good about them since I was always top in my class. (:D) And it seems only fair, given that the school gave out “colours” awards to the top performers in sports, that there should be something similar for academic performance. It didn’t seem to create unruly competitiveness; with such small classes everyone was pretty friendly already, and those of us at the top of the ranking were all quite close friends.
On the other hand, when it came to applying for university, all that the universities here ask is which quartile you’re in; it doesn’t matter if you’re #1 or #7, as long as you’re in the top 25%.
I have no idea if my high school did rankings beyond the top couple of students who gave speeches at graduation. If they did, it wasn’t a big deal and no one cared.
Mine did. I was part of the class of Y2K (largest in the country that year, if it makes a difference), and I remember it being a big deal among my fiercely competitive peer group.
graduated top 10% in HS… graduated at bottom of my pharmacy class (cuz they already did the weed out with 12% of applicants getting admitted for my class)
Incidentally I work with a pharmacy college valedictorian and we do the same job for the same pay
I was 103 out of 321. I gave absolutely zero fucks about it at the time, and give absolutely zero fucks about it now.
We didn’t get our ranking until the end of our senior year, sometime just before graduation. It was a percentile, and mine was only 89. I say “only” because out of over a thousand kids, I was the only one to get 1600 (out of 1600) on my SAT. Everyone accused me of cheating, except anyone who had been in a math class with me.
Anyway, the valedictorian got only 1593.
No employer has ever asked for my high school grades or ranking, or SAT score, or IQ. In the long term it’s all meaningless anyway.
What’s interesting is that both my partner and my ex also got 1600 on their SAT.