With high schools steadily abandoning class rankings—frustrating many
college admissions officers—Harvard admissions officials said they are
unfazed by the decrease in quantitative information that high schools
provide about students.
Many administrators, including those at Brown University,
Vanderbilt University, and Swarthmore College, said that decisions not
to rank high school students have hurt the evaluation processes at
their schools, The New York Times reported last week.
Admissions officials at Harvard College say they seek out
more information when class rankings are not provided, Director of
Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 wrote in an e-mail.
“We can handle any school’s system as long as we understand
it,” she wrote, “and if we aren’t familiar with the way a school
evaluates student academic performance, we’ll find out more.”
According to the Times article, some officials have said that
not ranking students further emphasizes standardized testing which can,
in some cases, hurt an applicant.
McGrath Lewis said that while she understood these concerns,
recent news articles dealing with the college admissions process placed
too much of an emphasis on the importance of class rankings.
At Harvard, “small differences in rank won’t determine the
admission decision,” she wrote. “Many of these stories seem to assume
that it does.”
Cambridge Rindge and Latin School administrators said that they still rank their students for practical purposes.
“We have a lot of scholarships that still use rankings,” said
Cambridge Rindge and Latin School principal Sybil N. Knight. “We
wouldn’t want to deny those opportunities to those students.”
And some undergraduates also acknowledged the practicality of class rankings.
“California actually uses a system that allows the top five
percent of students to be assured into one of their top four picks in a
UC school,” Obi Ugwu-Oju ’09, a graduate of Edison High School in
Fresno, California, said.
Ugwu-Oju also said students at his high school did not stress class rankings.
“It wasn’t an issue,” he said yesterday. “I think more students
just felt that the rankings meant how much effort you put into it and
not how smart you were.”
While some colleges have documented the increasing tendency
of high schools to shift away from tabulating class rankings, Harvard
does not document which schools or how many students provide rankings,
according to McGrath Lewis.
—Staff writer Laura A. Moore can be reached at lamoore@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Benjamin L. Weintraub can be reached at bweintr@fas.harvard.edu.
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