I was the salutatorian of my high school class. When I learned the news, I was pleasantly surprised. In the dark ages of the 1980s, I had no prior information that I would earn this honor other than my admission to the National Honor’s Society during my junior year (one of maybe 25 admitted from a class of 225) and my receipt of The Jefferson Book Award, one of two book awards distributed to my class. These were not goals that I had set for myself. Indeed, I was completely unaware of them. If I had attended a prior awards assembly for the distribution of academic honors, even ones for my two older sisters, I could not recall it. My surprise at the salutatorian announcement, I believe, made the honor all the more precious to me. Had I worked my entire high school career toward that specific goal, my reaction may have been, in part, relief, but instead, my reaction was pure pride. I had earned this award because of my strong work ethic.
Today, due to substantial changes in GPA calculations and course offerings, I believe that high schools should abandon class rank altogether.
The educational landscape has dramatically changed over the last forty years. Now, parents and children plot to secure a high class rank even before entering high school and track their rank semester to semester. A weighted GPA system, which evolved because of the entry of “college level” classes into the high school curriculum including AP coursework, is now used strategically and widely by students to game the system and leverage class rank. Honors courses that also offer a GPA premium can be found locally in the areas of sports marketing, JROTC, PE, Food Science, and Horticulture, courses that do not typically suggest different levels of proficiency among teenagers. Students, often guided by their parents, make decisions about class selection based on these weights and the reputation of teachers who are easy graders and forge a path to maximize their GPAs, often sacrificing student interests in favor of “weighted” coursework. As a result, classes such as AP Human Geography have skyrocketed in popularity. I have never had a student demonstrate any interest in human geography before registering for this class. Often, the registrants do not even know what the class is about. The course’s allure is due to the bump it delivers to a student’s GPA and due to its relatively lower level of difficulty.
This now common weighted GPA has skewed ranking results. A student’s high GPA may no longer signal top performance but rather a savvy approach to course registration. Most high schools, over 60%, have now eliminated class rank altogether because it, perhaps unfairly, disadvantages some students in the college admissions process and because the presence of a class rank and the intense attention to it create undue anxiety.
These GPA changes oddly remind me of my old supper club. Back in the day, our supper club felt that we needed to become more inclusive. The supper club grew and grew to larger numbers as we indulged inclusivity, until, one day, hosting the supper club became such an ordeal that anxiety prevented folks from wanting to host the club in their homes. The exact opposite of our original intention became true: The more inclusive we tried to make the club, the more exclusive it became. “How could you not be invited to join that humongous supper club?” The supper club eventually folded.
From my observation, this exclusivity argument has become at the center of the debate for class rank and for National Honors Society membership. The prestige of the top quintile of the class has eroded as strategy now plays a significant part of the process, and today, parents worry if their children are not admitted to the National Honors Society. Many parents believe their children are entitled to access these honors, and the system has afforded students a route to access them.
I am not trying to strip our most studious students, those who earn positions at the very top of their classes, of any prestige. They no doubt have worked tirelessly to earn their titles, so if your child is or was valedictorian, salutatorian, or nearly so, please know that I am not depriving him or her of any glory or satisfaction. But the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality of today’s parents is doing just that.
I am pointing to the parents who grovel for As on behalf of their children and to their children who dedicate just enough grit to slide into the A grade range (often a very low threshold) but not one ounce more than is necessary and who pad their course load with an array of “soft” honors coursework intentionally to elevate class rank. We live in a society that has normalized such behavior, so if you are among these parents or children, you have likely been swept into the mania.
We, however, have just one opportunity to raise our children, and I am suggesting that we should refocus our attention on the key values that make children strong students and fine young adults: kindness, honesty, curiosity, diligence, and genuine pride. Focusing on these fundamentals, as a society, can strip down the building inequities in our educational system. We need to redefine who is a “winner.” Winning is finding enjoyment in the educational process, savoring a good book, finding fulfillment from working hard to develop a skill, and showing kindness to a friend or community member in need. If your children have these qualities but do not earn that targeted class rank, the admission to that choice college, or any other so-called coveted honor, your children will have won and will be employable and likely fulfilled, firmly rooted in these values.
To accomplish this desired result, eliminating class rank is likely a necessity. By doing so, we can reclaim core values, curb some of the GPA strategies, and appropriately refocus attention on the fundamentals.