Rotate the foodstuffs!

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.