East Lyme High School will propose dropping class rank

East Lyme - A student ranked at the top of his or her class may catch the eye of college admissions officers, while another ranked 40th may be overlooked.

But the difference in academic performance between those two students may be negligible - a fraction of a percentile point, according to East Lyme High School Principal Michael Susi.

So now the high school is proposing to do away with class rankings, a system Susi said is not an accurate representation of students' academic achievements, especially in a competitive school where a student ranked 30th would make it in the top 10 percent of the 300-student class but a student ranked 31st would end up in the top 25 percent.

"To a college or university, they just look at that number," Susi said of student rankings. "They don't have a reference point for what that means. ... If you give it to them, they'll use that as a data point."

By eliminating class rankings, the school would be asking colleges to focus on other data to evaluate applicants, including the rigor of classes taken, SAT or ACT scores, letters of recommendation and application essays, Susi said.

Susi will propose the change tonight at the Board of Education's Academics, Athletics and Activities (AAA) Committee meeting, which is scheduled to begin at 6 at the high school. The proposal would need to be approved by the full board, and any changes would be applied to the entering freshman class this fall.

The school would continue to apply the current class rank system to current students.

Eliminating student rankings is a move more and more high schools are making, especially competitive public high schools and private schools, according to the College Board, the company behind the SAT college entrance exams and the Advanced Placement (AP) program. More than half of all high schools no longer report rankings, the College Board said.

Colleges also no longer weigh class rank as heavily as they once did, the College Board said.

In Connecticut, the majority of school districts considered wealthier and more competitive than East Lyme - per the state's Education Reference Groups - do not report student rankings, Susi said.

The high school is also proposing changing the formula that weighs classes according to level of difficulty to determine a student's GPA. For instance, the school's 19 AP classes carry more weight because they are the most challenging of courses offered, so a lower grade in an AP class would still be equivalent to an A in a lower-level class, Susi said.

To boost their GPAs - and in turn their class ranking - students tend to pick classes based on weight rather than interest in the subject matter, Susi said guidance counselors have reported. The school wants students to pursue personal interests and become well-rounded, and such heavy focus on class rank is getting in the way of that, he said.

Kelly Sheehan, the school's senior class president, agreed.

By getting rid of class rankings, "kids can take classes that they're interested in rather than take classes that they're not interested in to help their rank," she said. "They'll want to learn the subject and they'll end up doing better that way."

Students are keenly aware of where they stand among classmates, Sheehan said. When her classmates received their rank for the first time at the end of their first semester of junior year, "every single person in my grade was on the computer in the library trying to figure out where they were," she said.

Sophomore class president Claire Jasper said top students take pride in how highly they rank, but class rankings don't accurately reflect student performance because the school as a whole is so high-performing, she said.

"If you're (ranked) number 50, you think you're not that smart, but you really are," Jasper said.

j.cho@theday.com