WHILE high school seniors anxiously watch their mailboxes for acceptance letters during the next few weeks, their schools continue to discuss the role of class rankings. College admissions decisions are important; that's not exactly a disputed statement. It is logical, therefore, that high schools would seek to remove any factors that systematically disadvantage their students. For that reason, many small private schools have long declined to calculate their class rankings. This trend, however, has begun to spread to public high schools -- a harmful development which threatens to remove a valuable tool from the University admissions process.
Efforts to remove class ranking from consideration in college admissions decisions began several decades ago in small private schools. Since these schools can be some of the most competitive academic environments in secondary education, the GPAs of top students are often incredibly close, sometimes separated by only hundredths of a point. If the graduating class consists of only a few dozen students, it is quite conceivable that a high-scoring student will have a mediocre class ranking. According to the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, this viewpoint has caught on, as only 19 percent of private schools rank their students.
Although this approach can help some students' chances of admission by removing a potentially misleading statistic, it has unintended consequences for the University's admissions department. In an inteview Admissions Dean John Blackburn said, "Secondary schools think that ranking will be misused by college admissions offices." Unfortunately, he said, removing any piece of information, including class ranking, "makes it more difficult for admissions offices to make decisions."
While class ranking's potential downsides are quite clear, it can benefit the admissions process by acting as a complement to other factors, such as GPA and SAT scores. Class ranking helps to balance out the chief weakness of GPA -- grade inflation -- by showing the performance of a student compared to his or her peers. If a high school employed very lax grading standards, universities would be able to tell, based on class ranking, that an impressive GPA was actually due to grade inflation.
Class ranking, by comparing students to the rest of their class, can also complement the SAT, which compares students to the rest of the country. The SAT shows a student's natural intellectual aptitude, while class ranking shows a student's competitiveness, which can be just as important of a factor. Universities, after all, should do their best to admit students who display not only potential talent, but also the desire to excel -- best shown by class ranking.
Unfortunately, the trend against class ranking has begun to take hold at the places where it is most needed: public high schools. According to an interview with Blackburn, many public schools, including several in Fairfax County, have recently decided to drop the class ranking system ("Fewer high schools caculate class rank for college admission," March 20). Most public schools cannot claim, as private schools do, their enrollment to be so small and their environment so competitive that class ranking harms the college prospects of elite students. On the other hand, public schools are more prone to grade inflation, which can give an unfair boost to a student's admission chances if left unchecked. Under this system, mediocre students tend to gain relative to the truly excellent ones.
To be truthful, the decline of class ranking's importance in admissions is not an emergency. The process has been a gradual one that, in the case of private schools, has probably been more helpful than harmful. University admissions offices wouldn't face an impossible task if it disappeared outright. However, the decline of class rankings at public schools has the capability to cause real problems in the admissions process.
A safeguard against the distorting effects of grade inflation would be lost. Since admissions offices would lose an objective measure of a student's performance relative to classmates, they would be forced to increasingly rely on previous knowledge of an applicant's high school. Applications from schools with no history at the University, which already are at a disadvantage in the process, would face yet another obstacle. While class ranking has its flaws, abandoning it would be an unnecessary mistake for public high schools to make.
Stephen Parsley's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at sparsley@cavalierdaily.com.
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