Unrankable Success: Schools shouldn’t use class ranking systems to divide students, as it leads to unnecessary and unhealthy competition among classmates

For the past 11 years of my life, I’ve spent hours after school on worksheets, essays and projects for school where I’ve put everything I have into my current and future success, as have practically all of the other students here at East.

All of the presentations, book reports and DBQs I’ve done between now and first grade brings me pride, but I know for a fact that if we had a valedictorian at East, I would not even be close to earning that honor. And now suddenly my achievements seem to have less value. 

Grades in general can create an environment where learning becomes based on achievement rather than growth, especially when people are competing for the top spots in their grade. Class ranks are another tool that many schools have been eliminating, like East did in 2014 when the district decided it was doing more harm than good to SMSD students pursuing higher education, as it earned them lesser scholarships than their GPA alone would have.

Class rank and grades idolize extrinsic motivation and fuels students’ need for the tangible reward of doing well in school — good grades and a high class rank — rather than simply learning to better yourself. When we strive to be number one, we end up prioritizing turning in work as fast as possible because of the status that having high grades creates — the quantity becomes more important than the quality. Instead, we should take the opportunity to use these assignments to further our understanding of topics that can aid us in finding our interests. 

Though grades are trickier to flush out of school systems, abolishing class ranks nationwide like East has done is a much more realistic way to keep students’ focused on learning content without the pressure of attaining absolute excellence. 

There is no educational benefit to having class ranks in a school environment. It reinforces the idea that greatness or success is something that can only be attained by the best of the best and it leaves the other 400-plus students who didn’t make the cut go home with the equivalent of a plastic participation trophy after 12 long years of growing and learning as much as everyone else. 

Keeping track of class rank doesn’t measure students’ academic achievement. It has no real value beyond competition. 

Seniors who’ve spent their last few months applying to colleges may find East’s lack of class rank to be a hindrance in their applications because it becomes a blank. But according to the College Board, the importance of class ranks to college admission officers has declined as they rely more on SAT and ACT scores and GPA. In fact, the significance class rank holds to colleges has been decreasing for over a decade, and according to SharpSchool, only 19% of colleges by 2012 still considered class rank in applications. 

Plus, before it was discontinued, East’s class rank was weighted on a 5.0 scale, which meant that to increase your class rank, you had to take more advanced classes like honors, AP or IB that are also weighted on a 5.0 scale. So a student who put everything they had into their GPA but only took regular classes and ended with a 4.0 would still be far behind their fellow classmates. 

I understand that the concept of competition and the goal of becoming valedictorian or at least being in the top 10% of the class rank is meant to motivate students to be academically successful, but students who know they’re not going to make it are immediately disheartened. 

While it’s commonly believed that class rank enforces how important hard work is to success and prepares students for real life scenarios where everything is supposedly competitive, this seems like a dramatic, and largely untrue claim. Class rank can be very exclusive, regarding only one aspect of high school life: GPA. 

Using the idea of rank, one could conclude that the world is highly exclusive as well, but in the real world, there isn’t just one person on top and several people are needed for our society to function — the world needs more than one doctor or lawyer. 

Not to mention, between the top 10% on a class rank, the difference between intellectual ability 

— or as some may see it, potential success — is statistically insignificant, according to author Alfie Kohn, who wrote “Schooling Beyond Measure.” Class rank does not account for any extracurriculars or sports and the difference between top students’ ranks is often one AP class. 

Education is not meant to be a simple game of merit that results from class ranks — it’s meant to be the foundation of interests and knowledge. If a class rank is going to dilute this main goal with competition and extrinsic motivations, then East’s lack of it is highly beneficial. Colleges will find who you are as a person and student far more interesting than a computer-calculated rank.