Officials Dismiss Ranking Concerns

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.