[Ronald ReaganROCKS]

Man, more Liberal feel-goodery everybody wins atmosphere in Liberal Academia. Pretty soon there won't be much of a need to go to school, you too can be valedictorian-even if you don't show up for school.

[Anti-Bubba182]

I agree. In their efforts to not hurt feelings they are weakening students and not preparing them for the real world.

[Nextrush]

Ranking and designations like Valedictorian and Salutatorian are being sytematically removed from the educational system including here in my town.

[FlingWingFlyer]

Intense pressure? It's a good thing these poor teens didn't go to school in the pre-cucumber and condom days when people used slide rules and had to learn certain things before they could move up to the next grade. No calculators, no cell phones, no computers, no nothing. A pencil, a pen, a pad and a slide rule. Yeah. It's a lot more "intense" these days. Geeeesh. This is dumb. Our "schools" are dumb.

[Porterville]

Do you really need your rank displayed to losers if you are a bad ass?

[operation clinton cleanup]

80% of high schoolers could care less about their class standing, let alone even know they had one.

[southernnorthcarolina]

I wouldn't have much of a problem with a deemphasis of class rankings (which, due to grade inflation, questionable GPA bonuses for advanced courses, difficulty of comparing between schools, and other factors, are becoming of dubious value anyway) if the SATs and other standardized test scores were given more weight. SATs, though not perfect, are closer to fair and objective measures than grades, assigned by fallible and possibly biased teachers, themselves often products of third-rate "teachers colleges" are, I would submit.

Unfortunately, standardized test scores are being deemphasized, too. Culturally biased, don't you know. And the reason we know that they're culturally biased is that some cultures don't score as well on them. Circular logic at its finest.

So with grades deemphasized, and standardized scores deemphasized, what fills in? Subjective judgments on the merits of extracurricular activities? "Diversity," perhaps? How the college applicants "feel" about the important issues of the day?

[burzum]

How do you achieve great results?

Set a standard and meet it.

Ask anyone who has ever served in the military the importance of setting standards (or goals) and subsequently meeting them. And ask anyone who has ever served in a below average unit why the unit performed so poorly. The answer to the later case is almost always that the unit failed to set and enforce standards.

These schools are going to go down the toilet because academic performance does not occur in a vacuum. People need to know what the level of the bar is and how they are competing with others. All this change is going to do is to tell students that it doesn't matter if they don't meet standards anymore because it won't affect them. We'll see how this works out for them.

[skimask]

OK....Remove ranking from schools so the poor kids wont get their delicate feelings hurt. Unfortunately the real world and employers are not as concerned about your feelings. They are setting these kids up for a lifetime of failure.

[word_warrior_bob]

God forbid you should COMPETE in anything, it's so...so...I don't know, exciting, and for boys it will just make them too macho and misogynistic, how will they ever turn out to be gay like we want them?

[Political Junkie Too]

A side effect will be to get rid of the senior speech usually given by the Magna Cum Laude. Nobody wants to hear what really inspires the class leaders anymore, either.

-PJ

[Bernard]

With inflated grades, getting rid of the class ranking system will make all children the same. Jacobs High School, several miles north of Naperville, has many valedictorians; either based on all A's in school or a GPA over 4.0.

One of the local papers has a session with all the area valedictorians each year. Jacobs has about 1/2 the total from 12 schools, because all the others have one each. It must be emberassing for these kids, once they get over the initial rush of being one of many.

[napscoordinator]

I was ranked 500 in my class and we only had 209. It must have been because of the negative 80 percent that I was awarded as my final average. sarc.

[dawn53]

This has to do with GPA. My son's college uses the plus/minus system of GPA. So just getting an A, doesn't automatically get you a 4.0 for the class. An A- will only rate you a 3.6.

And in college GPA does matter. You keep your scholarship by keeping up your GPA, you get accepted into a master's program only if you have a certain GPA, etc.

With honors classes in high school your GPA is often above a 4.0, but that was happening when I went to HS many moons ago (35 years ago the first 10 ranked in my class had above a 4.0, so this is nothing new.

Sooner or later the kids will have to face the reality that school is competition, so why not in HS before they run into total shock during college.