Class rank

[yrmencyn]

There's a NYTimes article today (available with login here) about the growing trend among American high schools either to not calculate class rank or to withhold it in most cases from universities and colleges in the supplementary application materials.  It's interesting overall, but this quote, from the second page, was especially interesting to me:

"The day that we handed out numerical rank was one of the worst days in my professional life," said Margaret Loonam, a co-principal and director of guidance at Ridgewood High School, a public school in northern New Jersey that stopped telling students and colleges about class rank a decade ago. "They were sobbing. Only one person is happy when you hand out rank — the person who is No. 1."

Who are these sobbing students?  I don't remember anything like that when they handed out rank at my school.  I was always near the top of my class, as were most of my friends, and thus I should have seen some of this behavior among my peer group (the top-ranked students being theoretically the most susceptible to cutthroat behavior and grade-drama), but I just don't recall any at all.  Sure, there was some rivalry, and a desire to either do better or keep doing well, but when I got ranked 28 I didn't boohoo and cry, I just shrugged and thought, for about ten seconds, that I should try harder, and then I threw the paper away.  I graduated 4 in my class, and I honestly was just fine with that.  Maybe they hid it well, but no one seemed too egregiously bent out of shape over where they fell  in the rankings.  Maybe Ridgewood High School's just full of drama queens.

Comments

[rosepurr.livejournal.com]

More broadly, I wish schools would get off the the is going to RUIN YOUR LIFE kick.

[groovy2382.livejournal.com]

when it came down for rankings i didn't care...i was already accepted and going to the place i wanted so i could care less about anything but that...BUT...we did have validictorian drama...the girl who was supposed to be it got caught cheating! Oh so scandalous! She stole a copy of the upcoming english test faxed it to another girl towards the top in our class so they could study ahead of time...apparently she had been doing it for years according to her friends! Well the other girl lent her notebook out and forgot the faxed copy of the test was in the notebook (can we say doh!) the other girl opened up the notebook in class and it fell out when the teacher walked by and picked it up...the name of the faxer was on the page (the girl's dad) hence knowing who it was and who it was sent to. Can we say double dummy? I didn't have much respect for the girls before...but let's just say it's now even less than zero.

[osu-l-greenleaf.livejournal.com]

Graduating in a class of like 500 or more students, the rank thing was seriously no big deal. Those of us on the upper half were just glad we weren't on the lower half and the bottom 20 or so students always dropped out of school before graduation anyways. Why get so bent out of shape over a silly number?

[(Anonymous)]

It could be just a very competitive or exclusive kind of high school, although I'd imagine something like that would more likely happen in a private school. It could be set up in some kind of neighboorhood or city where there are high expectations.

I was always okay with my ranking, but the person who was usually the most distraught about it was my mother. I suppose it's an Asian parent thing, but it's really annoying because my mother didn't even go to "high school" (her family couldn't afford it in Vietnam). I was ranked 16 my freshman year and my mom was SOOOOOOOOOOOOO disappointed. How could I let 15 other people do better than me?!?! That was actually the highest ranking I ever got, I only dropped from that. A more extreme example was her reaction to Trang's ranking. Mom thought Trang was in the top 5, but then she found out she had dropped to 10. She was ultimately fine with it, but there was an initial shock that was unnecessary.

Just saying, it's all about the climate.

- Hung

[queenmargot.livejournal.com]

In my high school, rank meant nothing either. There were like 8 people who had 4.0s at graduation, so... I think they were assigned 1-8 alphabetically. There was no Valedictorian; I mean, those 8 were not considered Valedictorians. The top 25 people or so all had greater than a 3.5. There were only about 100 people in my graduating class, so I guess that's actually pretty great.

I remember I was 13th, though, and I thought, "Well... I would be 13th."

[alstaria.livejournal.com]

No great drama at my school either. We were given our rankings first in sophomore year(I think I was exactly #10 that year) and they updated us each semester. Us in the top 10 were more a group of friends than a bunch of rivals. Well, except for Miss #1, but that wasn't because we were jealous of her; she was just a bitch :)

[(Anonymous)]

Haha... I hope those kids were able to look back a few years later and see how silly the whole thing was...

[pixidala.livejournal.com]

Officially, Beaumont didn't rank. Unofficially - you could figure out what you were. The biggest problem in a school of highly qualified work-your-ass-off overachievers is that you could have a GPA that would qualify you as magna cum laude and be one of the lower numbers (for example, I had a 3.8 and I was number 43 out of a class of 113). It was more that the school wanted colleges to see our GPAs, because when ranked against each other, the comparisons were meaningless. And a lot of the girls who had above a 4.0 freaked out when they realised they weren't in the top tenth percentile. So I suppose it really depends on the school and the people.

[daundelyon.livejournal.com]

My school had waaaaay to many overachiever AP kids (including me, I'm sorry to say ;) ) to even consider naming a valadictorian.

[lucki-dog.livejournal.com]

We got our ranks, but I don't think anyone cared. 4.13, 17/415 top 5%, good enough for me.