Published May 23, 1999
Go figure this:
If your teenager takes four advanced-placement classes in high school, earns an A in all of them, and fills her idle school hours with study halls, she finishes the year at the top of the class with a 5.0 average on a 4.0 grading scale because AP classes carry extra credit.
But, if she takes four advanced-placement classes, earns an A in all of them, and fills her idle time with a music class -- and aces that, too -- she ends up with only a 4.8 average, dragged down by that enrichment class that doesn't offer extra credit.
Which goes part way toward explaining why the class valedictorian has become a sore subject during the annual pomp-and-circumstance season.
For decades, of course, the valedictorian has been the No. 1-ranked student, the kid with the best grades over the course of his high-school career and the one invited to deliver the class speech, the valedictory, on graduation day. Valedictorians are still so favored that colleges routinely recruit them and regularly brag about them. Harvard University this year told Peterson's Competitive Colleges, a college guide, that it had 442 valedictorians in its fall 1998 class, the most in the country. "No question, the valedictorian gets our attention," says Jerome Lucido, director of admissions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which recruited 205.
But ranking one student The Best means ranking everyone else Less Than Best or even Close to Worst. And in the fraught world of college applications -- and fiercely competitive kids, litigious parents, and a movement that claims that competition damages self-esteem and stifles learning -- ranking students has taken on a nasty odor.
"We try to celebrate our students equally," says Susan Kastner Tree, director of counseling at private Westtown School near Philadelphia. But then she continues: "Rank can really blackball kids." She adds: "Parents are paying much too much money to have their kids in the bottom half of the class."
Ranking students certainly is a fallible system. With no national standards, or measures or scores, a student ranked toward the bottom in one school might be ranked toward the top in another -- which particularly disadvantages high-achieving schools where kids take lots of honors courses and almost everyone goes to college. The private Blake School in Minneapolis contends that its students are among the brightest 50 percent of the population, so that 75 percent of its senior class should be ranked among the top 25 percent of kids nationally.
Being in that top quarter is no small matter, either. Colleges routinely publish a myriad of statistics about their incoming freshmen, in part to help recruit students the next year. The Princeton Review, another college guide, reports the average college-entrance test scores for the freshman class at hundreds of colleges each year, the number of kids turned away, and the percentage who were in the top 10 percent, 25 percent and 50 percent of their high-school class.
It reported, for example, that 95 percent of the freshman class at the University of California-Berkeley graduated in the top tenth of their high-school class; at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, it was 94 percent. Frank Sachs, college counselor at Blake, says that 34 of this year's senior class of 110 are National Merit Scholarship semifinalists -- which means they're really smart kids. But statistically, only 11 of them can squeeze into the top 10 percent of the class.
Beyond that, class rank is easy to manipulate for the truly committed. James Sindelar, recently retired as college counselor at Palatine High School, outside Chicago, tells of leaving dropouts on the class roster until after the class ranking is set (if they're left in the bottom half of the class, they might nudge someone else into the top half). A transferring student also offers opportunities: Take a smart kid off because he'll hurt almost everyone else's rank; leave a poor student on to push everyone else up a bit.
If the grown-ups are adept at fiddling the numbers, the kids have it down to a science. At high-achieving Commack High School, in Suffolk County, N.Y., about a dozen seniors a year graduate with a better-than-perfect grade, which at Commack means with more than a 100-point average. To do that, they have to load up on advanced-placement classes, where a perfect grade is 110 points, and on honors classes, where the top grade is 106.
But they also have to delay taking required courses -- like health, which doesn't carry extra credit -- until their senior year, after class rankings are tabulated and sent out in college applications. And at all costs, they have to bypass non-honors electives like music, art and drama. "There are kids who calculate this stuff in the womb, before they're born," says Jerry Stone, the guidance chairman at Commack.
Many schools try to derail the competition, but with strange fallout. Eaglecrest High School in Aurora, Colo., decided when it opened nine years ago that anyone with a straight-A average would be declared valedictorian, no matter that some of those A's carried honors credit and some didn't. It ended up with 18 valedictorians last year. Vestavia Hills High School, outside Birmingham, Ala., ranks anyone with a 4.0 average No. 1 in the class, which means that 5 percent of its 335 seniors regularly get to claim on their college applications that they're No. 1.
And at least two school districts were hauled into court last graduation season over their choice of valedictorian. In Oklahoma, a teenager unsuccessfully sued to prevent two straight-A students from sharing the honor with her. In Colorado, the parents of another student contended that the school deprived their daughter of the valedictorian's slot because they failed to advise her to take two additional honors courses. They didn't win, either.
A few years ago, troubled by all this, the National Association of Secondary School Principals hired Pat Riordan, dean of admissions at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., to study how college-admissions officers were using high-school class rankings. "A misuse of a piece of data," she concluded. Private schools already had begun dropping class ranking, but with the principals' report, competitive suburban schools began joining in. This month, Commack -- which has studied the matter for seven months and talked about it for five years -- will ask its school board to abandon rank beginning in 2002. "We're not going to split hairs any more," says the counselor, Mr. Stone.
No one counts how many of the country's 27,000 secondary schools no longer rank students. Dr. Riordan estimates 60 percent, and says George Mason doesn't "even bother to look at rank any more." An applicant might tell the college he's a valedictorian, but "we wouldn't put it anywhere in the system" she adds. The College Board, which administers the SAT test, sees the trend, too. It says almost half of this year's freshmen at Duke University didn't report rank on their applications; one in three Stanford University freshmen didn't either.
That irritates some admissions officers, like Bruce Poch at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., where a third of the applicants come from high schools that don't rank their seniors. He blames the trend on "schools that don't want to bear the responsibility of putting a label on a student, and parents who see grades as a fee-for-services thing."
Emboldened by dropping class rank, moreover, many high schools now aren't giving grade-point averages either, and sometimes aren't even giving grades -- just a checkmark next to the classes the youngster attempted. Instead of rankings, admissions officers report receiving "scattergrams," which are grids with a bunch of dots that represent the grade distribution of the class, with a little arrow suggesting where the applicant might rank -- if the school ranked. Or they get class breakdowns by deciles, quartiles and quintiles (a ranking in the first decile, for example, puts a student in the top 10 percent of the class.) Commack plans "groupings," says Mr. Stone, and will send colleges a "conversion chart" to explain what they mean.
"Guidance counselors are under enormous pressure from their parents" to keep bad news off college applications, says Jon Boeckenstedt, dean of enrollment at St. Bonaventure University, in St. Bonaventure, N.Y. But that comes at the same time the universities are under enormous pressure from their boards and alumni to meet quality, diversity and revenue goals in their recruiting, and to collect the data to prove it, he adds.
Faced with a paucity of information on a student, counselors say they are giving greater weight to standardized tests like the SAT. But that flies into the eye of yet another academic storm: Standardized tests are under attack from people who claim the tests benefit kids from high-income schools that impart a good education, and discriminate against poor and minority kids who attend failed inner-city schools. That argument carries such resonance that Texas has decided to guarantee a seat at its premiere state universities to students who rank in the top 10 percent of their public high school; California plans a similar system for the top 4 percent of students in each of its high schools.
That's not to say that ranking students, and singling out the best for honors, aren't still popular in other states, too. "Our community wants ranking," says Dan Franklin, the counselor at Eaglecrest High where a committee of 20 debated the issue for four months this year. "You give recognition to the athletes, the band, the theater -- why not to your good students?" he asks. Vincent Huth, the counselor at Donelson Christian Academy outside Nashville, says the school's parents come up with cash prizes for the top students, and local newspapers run pictures of the valedictorians. "I'm looking for more opportunities to see that our students are honored, rather than less," he says.
But to others, the race for grades discourages learning and creativity. Alfie Kohn, an independent education researcher in Boston who writes and lectures about the disincentives of grades, says that "the more grades matter, the less motivation there is to explore ideas in their own right." Grades are bad enough, he adds, but then, "the poison of competition" encourages youngsters to triumph over classmates. He'd get rid of class rank, honor societies, honor rolls, state tests that rank youngsters against one another, and "anything else that's about victories and not about excellence," he says.
One of the few studies of valedictorians offers a mixed view of their success anyway. Karen Arnold, a professor at Boston College, has followed the lives of 81 Illinois valedictorians since 1981, and reports that they've "won every conceivable academic honor, and knocked the top off the work-ethic tests." But "no one's discovered anything," she adds, and she doesn't look to them to become the inventors, artists, thinkers or politicians who shape their society.
That's because conventional achievers become valedictorians, she argues -- those who know the rules and work very hard within them. "I'd look for one of Bill Gates' staff to be a valedictorian, not Bill Gates," she says. Indeed, the Microsoft chairman wasn't a valedictorian; he went to a school that didn't rank. Neither, for that matter, was President Clinton; he ranked fourth.
With fewer schools ranking students, and with those who do rank students naming lots of kids No. 1, choosing someone to speak for the graduating class has become a complicated matter. Commack High, having spent this year deciding it wanted to get rid of ranking, will spend next year deciding how else to choose a class graduation speaker. Mr. Stone, the counselor, expects to assemble a committee of parents, administrators, teachers, students and the Parent Teacher Association to sort out the matter before graduation day 2002.
Westtown has a class committee that chooses a dozen potential speakers who then submit to, first, a general election and, then, a run-off. "As Quakers, we don't vote on a lot of things, but we do vote on this," says Ms. Tree, the director of counseling. Equally complicated, Eaglecrest declares the senior with the highest grade-point average to be valedictorian -- along with everyone else whose grades are within one-tenth of a point of being the highest. If there are a lot of valedictorians, "several might have to share a poem," says Mr. Franklin, the counselor.
Blake, which avoids competition by not having an honor roll, nevertheless recognizes the student with the highest grade average during its graduation ceremony, and gives out lots of other academic honors. But the honor of speaking for the class is given to the student who wins a speech competition that is decided by a faculty-student committee that, in turn, is chosen by the senior class.
And then there's Community High School in Ann Arbor, Mich. Academic awards and recognitions of accomplishment are handed out in individual goodie bags, well before the public school's graduation ceremony so that "nobody is able to see the skinny bags from the fat bags," says John Boshoven, the guidance counselor. Then, each of this year's 111 seniors will be invited to speak at the ceremony June 8 because "everyone is seen as equal contributors to the class of '99," he adds.
What will that be like? "Well, it will be long," says Mr. Boshoven. "That's one thing you can be sure of."
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