[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Class Rank and Average Children (WAS Vanity/Self-Esteem / )

[Jennifer Boggess Ramon]

At 12:43 PM +0000 6/9/02, cindysphynx wrote:
>
>Here's one idea to throw into the pot.  I think one thing that could
>be undermining self-esteem is the tremendous amount of *ranking* of
>people that goes on.  You get grades -- someone else's assessment of
>how you stack up -- from the time you are five years old.  In high
>school and college, this morphs into an actual class rank -- 200
>people are *better* than you are, and 250 are worse.  (I always
>wondered how the person at the rock bottom felt about this.)

Hmm.  I went to one of the state magnet high schools, and the policy 
there was to steadfastly refuse to rank the students.  The rationale 
was that every one of us, to have gotten into the magnet school to 
begin with, would have had to be in the top ten percent of our 
original high schools, and it simply wasn't fair to suddenly be in 
the bottom half simply because you chose to challenge yourself.  The 
school did release our GPA's to the colleges we applied to, but no 
ranking.

I don't think the college I went to ranked the general population, 
either.  I think it did calculate ranks for individual schools - 
architecture, for instance - but not for the general student body.

-- 
  - Boggles, aka J. C. B. Ramon			boggles at earthlink.net
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