Originally Posted by Bostonian
Originally Posted by bluemagic
MY DS16's school/district does not do valedictorian just for this reason. In fact they don't do class 'rank' either. What they do is will give colleges a percentage 'rank".. ie in the top 5%, 10%, 25%. All students who have a 'top' GPA are given awards. There are huge numbers who have GPA's above a 4.0 every year. This is one of the things I think my DS's school does right.
I disagree, since I don't like the idea of discarding information, which is what such "binning" does. If colleges think the 1st and 25th student in a class of 500 are equivalent, they can make their admissions decisions accordingly, but they should get the raw rank. I was 2nd in a class of almost 500. To say only that I was only in the top 25 would have hurt my admissions chances and I think misrepresented my level of accomplishment. (This last sentence does not sound modest, but I don't think my classmates would have said I was the 10th best or 25th best student in the class. I was voted most studious boy smile.)

The person ranked 51st out 500 won't like being consigned to the top 25% bin, having just missed the top 10% cutoff.
I think I explained this wrong. In their councilor letter sent to the school they list GPA ranges with percentiles for the graduating class, and they get a GPA from the school for this student. Not a percentage range for this student. So a admissions officer can see if a student is in the approx. 11% percentile. Every year appox. 35+ students probably have a GPA within a very close range of each other. Within (0.05% of each other) Including many with approximately exactly the same GPA.

Otherwise these students do things to to try and up their GPA, like not taking art and/or music because it will lower their GPA. Students try and figure out ways to boost the system. Or taking required classes that don't give a +1 point at an onine school. They do this stuff anyway but the school is trying to take the stress away from having them quibble about that last 0.01 percent.

Last edited by bluemagic; 05/11/15 02:52 PM.