Have you ever been jealous of one of your friends that had a more “lenient” teacher for the same class?
Perhaps your teacher will not allow you to make test corrections but your friend’s teacher allowed test corrections on every test. Maybe your teacher gives you one free late assignment per six weeks, while your friend gets to turn in every assignment late with little or no penalty. Automatically, the possibility of your friend’s grade being much higher than yours, in the same course, is more likely.
You see class rank is only an illusion that students are subjected. It is wrapped in to our competitiveness. Class rank is biased and full of subjective decisions. Class rankings are nothing more than a number, just like a scale reads your weight.
That same number may cause serious competition between students, but honestly it is not a completely accurate judgment of a student’s intelligence or ability to learn. That number is solely based on which teachers a student has had in their career.
Part of our problem with this class rank system is how it degrades students into just a number. It is sad that we have to have a number that represents our status as a student. Wouldn’t it be nice of all students attended school to learn and understand the world?
The solution is simple: eliminate these class ranks entirely.
Many high schools, especially private schools, across the United States have stopped reporting class ranks to universities and colleges specifically because of the problems listed above. Students at schools where ranks are shared often take classes just to increase the likelihood that they will get a better grade, instead of for the learning experience. Students go after the easy “A” instead of taking a challenging course where they might actually get a B.
Truthfully at a school like Bowie the difference between the 20th ranked and 40th ranked student probably factors to the 1/10th or even 1/100th of a percentage point, which basically means that those students have virtually the same exact grades.
We would love to see Bowie High School and AISD follow the lead of those other schools and stop factoring and reporting class ranks to post-secondary schools. We know the top-10% rule that allows students to qualify for admittance to state schools has really dropped to top-8%, why use that at all, those schools should just take the best students based on college entrance exams, the SAT, the ACT and student essays.
Colleges don’t really need to know exact ranks to evaluate the quality of each high school applicant. They have plenty of ways to complete that task. It might also help those students who used to automatically be rejected because they fell just a little outside the top-10% or 8% get into state schools because their test scores might be higher, or they might have more extra-curricular activities that recruiters find appealing.
And that is the heart of our argument, colleges should be using every factor in their power to determine who should be in their programs based on intelligence, ability to learn, involvement in outside activities, and teacher recommendations about so-called soft skills like leadership, reliability, and character, instead of an arbitrary number.
Other high performing schools have been able to successfully eliminate class ranks by sending colleges and universities letters of explanations and it has not impacted their student body. Bowie falls into this category. Our students have proven themselves year after year and the ability of our students shouldn’t come into question.
There is one other piece of this puzzle that we have to address; the valedictorian and salutatorian. Currently those are based on class rank, but if that ranking system disappeared, who would speak at graduation? We believe the student body at large can be trusted to pick the best two speakers that would represent our school at graduation. A selection process could be created where students have to “apply” to the students on campus for the right to speak at graduation.