Class ranking unnecessary for colleges, students

Walking through the halls at Saratoga High, one can’t help but see students talking about the last impossibly hard AP Biology test or stressing over an upcoming in-class essay. With an average of 98 percent of its students bound for college, the school is a breeding ground for academic stress. The last thing students need is additional pressure.

Nobody wants to hear that he or she is inferior to other people. Class rankings—the sorting of students based on their grade point averages (GPA)—have the potential to crush a person’s confidence, especially if schoolwork is not his or her cup of tea. To avoid this peer pressure, Saratoga and other high schools do not rank students.

“The day that we handed out numerical rank was one of the worst days in my professional life,” said Margaret Loonam, an administrator of Ridgewood High in New Jersey. “[Students] were sobbing. Only one person is happy when you hand out rank: the person who is No. 1.”

Various colleges ask applicants for their class rank. Not only does GPA ranking sort students unfairly, but it also puts unnecessary pressure on students to outdo others.

Ideally, students would study for the sake of expanding their knowledge and becoming more educated. College should serve as an opportunity for higher education; instead, students at schools like Saratoga High have focused on getting into the “best” colleges. Encouraged by GPA rankings, schooling has become a race for recognition.

Instead of providing college admissions officers with an objective measure of success, class rank arbitrarily gives certain students an advantage over others. Different high schools assign grades in various ways; a 4.0 GPA at one school is not equivalent to a 4.0 at another. An individual’s rank is relative to the school he or she attends, rendering class rank useless as a tool to compare students from all over the country.

Additionally, ranking students based on academic performance shifts the purpose of education from an opportunity to learn into a contest to maximize one’s GPA. Encouraged by colleges to place the highest in their class, students forget that school is supposed to promote cooperation and the value of all students, regardless of academic aptitude.

Especially at competitive high schools, students do not need to be told that they are better or worse than their peers. On the contrary, schools should discourage this judgmental type of thinking by removing class rank entirely. Colleges also must stop requesting ranks—as long as admissions offices ask for them, high schools will comply.

Class rank has corrupted the integrity of the modern education system by encouraging students to work simply to outclass their peers. Ranking does little for students, teachers and officials short of providing another skewed standard of success.