High-School Class Rank Declines as a Criterion for College Admission

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Eric Hoover reports on the decreasing importance of high-school class rank for colleges. “Among the traditional measures of student quality, class rank is widely described by admissions officers as the fuzziest,” says Hoover. Only 19 percent of colleges now give “considerable importance” to class rank when considering applicants. 

In the past, four major stakeholder audiences were keenly interested in students’ class rank:

• College admissions officers, who thought class rank had the aura of fairness: “Seeing how an applicant stacked up to his or her peers seemed like an essential way of running the Darwinistic realm of selective admissions, where talk of competition of ubiquitous,” says Hoover. And indeed, students from the top of their high-school classes seemed to do better in college.

• University trustees, prospective students, and external evaluators, including the annual U.S. News ranking, which includes the percent of students at the top of their high-school classes in its calculations; Texas uses class rank to improve minority students’ access to public universities, and this is part of the Fisher v. University of Texas affirmative-action case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Students themselves, who compete to be at the top of their graduating class;

• Parents, who want to know that their children are excelling and refuse to accept that they might be in the bottom half (the Lake Wobegon Effect).

But some of the variables have changed. “Grading scales have gone haywire,” says Hoover, “varying from school to school and resulting in 5.2 GPA’s and multiple valedictorians, as well as students with all A’s and a few B’s who rank below the top tenth. Also, grade inflation has become a major concern for colleges.” 

And many high schools have stopped calculating student ranks and naming valedictorians. This has led colleges to estimate students’ class rank, a practice that recently embarrassed George Washington University and led to a downgrading of its U.S. News ranking.

“At one time, class rank was useful, especially when looking at students from schools that you weren’t familiar with,” says Pamela Horne of Purdue University. “But for many institutions it’s not meaningful. It’s disappearing, and it’s not representative of the class.” Christoph Guttentag of Duke University agrees: “Just like college rankings, it assigns a false accuracy, a false differentiation among students.” 

“High-School Class Rank, a Slippery Metric, Loses Its Appeal for Colleges” by Eric Hoover in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 7, 2012 (Vol. LIX, #15, p. A1, A5), no free e-link

From the Marshall Memo #464