Many people will brag about being 1rst in their class. Or maybe even 2nd or 3rd.
But it occurs to me, if someone is 1rst, doesnt someone have to eventually be last?
So say a medical school graduates 30 new doctors or a law school 30 new lawyers. One of them is 1rst and so on. Is the person who graduates last terrible?
It seems to me that in such cases while yes, one person may truly be a standout, but when you throw everyones strengths and weaknesses together and factor those all in, plus the fact they all had to pass at a certain competency level, is anyone truly “last”? Maybe their is truly one person who just squeaked by but dont most graduates fall onto a kind of curve?
If a mechanic who graduated last in his class is working on your car, you might not get too stressed out; it’s annoying if your engine dies during your next commute, but it’s not the end of the world.
But if you need a heart-lung transplant, will you really feel OK if your surgeon graduated last in his class?
ETA anecdote. When my daughter was in college she had never had lower than an A. I was concerned that she wasn’t able to have a social life in college and I talked her into relaxing a bit. When she got her first B she was cool with it, but explained to her mom that I was the reason she got it (she meant that in a very good way). Her mom was pissed.
I was never first in anything, except for top score in spy hunter at a bar in Philadelphia(and that only lasted 3 days), so my experience is limited. I do remember reading research several years ago on valedictorians, and there was no career, except for a career in academia in which it was particularly beneficial; I will try to find it if someone yells “cite”. I think for mathematicians and physicist the difference can be and order of magnitude; also I remember reading a thread a couple weeks ago about top programmers having vastly superior capabilities than the rest of the pack. I was speaking with a doctor in a coffee shop once, and she said surgeons have a wide range of abilities, and some are always bad; no amount of years of experience helps them get better at surgery.
If you choose a ranking system as opposed to a competency system then failures are by necessity created by the system.
Is it axiomatic that if someone is first, then someone else has to be last?
In a race with eight runners, then this would obviously be true, but in a class of thirty, there may well be a high achiever declared as ‘first in the class’, but the rest would usually be lumped together and not ranked.
Some schools take this into account in admissions. Harvard, for example, admits many student-athletes. Many of them aren’t expected to be top students as well as top athletes. They help fill out the bottom of the class. If you can say that you played football or rowed for Harvard nobody asks what your class rank was. The reality is that nobody asks what your class rank was anyway. The only people who bring up class rank in conversation or interviews are people who were at the head of the class. Nobody else cares.
I’ve always heard that top medical and law schools will mandate X% of each class gets an A, Y% gets a B and so on… So you could actually do quite well and still get an awful grade if everyone else does better than you.
FWIW, George A. Custer was last in his class. Whether this really made a difference in the end is debatable. I think not, but that’s a whole 'nother thread.
[QUOTE=Arlo Guthrie]
During these hard days and hard weeks, everybody always
has it bad once in a while. You know, you have a bad time of
it, and you always have a friend who says “Hey man, you
ain’t got it that bad. Look at that guy.” And you at that
guy, and he’s got it worse than you. And it makes you feel
better that there’s somebody that’s got it worse than you.
But think of the last guy. For one minute, think of the last
guy. Nobody’s got it worse than that guy. Nobody in the
whole world. That guy…he’s so alone in the world that he
doesn’t even have a street to lay in for a truck to run him over.
He’s out there with nothin’. Nothin’s happenin’ for that cat.
[/QUOTE]
Text
Wellllllll…I would posit that for certain fields (Medical, Law, Engineering?) the rigors of completing the program ensures that even the person who is last in ranking is at least very competent. One would have to be somewhat superior to be accepted into the programs in the first place. From a personal side, humans are by nature competitive and like to rank themselves against their peers. But I would be skeptical of assuming Ms. #1 is statistically significantly “better” than Mr. #27.
It’s like the Olympics, if you made the team, you are already better than 99.99% of everyone else.
That said, it is probably more important which school one attends than where one ends in their class ranking (Last at Harvard is assumed to be better than First at Podunk U).
I don’t think humans are necessarily competitive and ranking by nature. I think it is a heavily ingrained social construct (in modern Amercan society anyway), bolstered by many things including bad, inaccurate “science” we learn in high school. I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack.