Take Class Rank With A Grain Of Salt

To the Editor:

I agree with the suggestion to eliminate the reporting of class rank at Newtown High School to colleges and universities.

Besides the reasons cited in The Bee, there are the weird problems of timing in ninth grade. There has always been a confusion about ninth grade courses: for years, parents were told, and some program books stated, that they were not weighted for class rank purposes (this was also posted on the NHS website in the Faculty Handbook), so that all students could start on a level playing field. However, other notations state that ninth grade classes are weighted and used in class rank if they are not “entry level.” Therefore, ninth grade Honors French II gets you an extra 40 points over Honors Latin I (there is no Latin I in eighth grade); Honors Ancient/Medieval History (a one-semester course, considered a “tenth grade course”) gets you an extra 20 points in ninth grade over Honors Modern History; Honors Biology gets you 40 points over Honors Earth Science, though neither has a prerequisite; Honors Math II gets you 40 points over Honors Math I. A student can easily enter tenth grade with as many as 140 points over another student, even though they both took all Honors classes! This is a deficit that is very unlikely to be overcome.

For this reason, there have been some odd outcomes in past years; suffice it to say that previous rankings may have done little more than reflect which of the top students took Latin rather than French or Spanish, or which semester they took Ancient History!

An additional point to be made is that according to the field of statistics, and as taught in NHS science classes, when you divide numbers in this kind of situation, the answer cannot have more of what are called “significant figures” than the lowest number of significant figures going into the division: hence in a number like 92.3452, the numbers following the decimal are not statistically significant. Even without that caveat, common sense tells us that when the grades going into the calculation can themselves be at least slightly arbitrary — if only because some teachers grade harder than others — the answer cannot possible be accurate to the thousandth of a point.

This change will have no effect on my family; my older children are no longer in high school, and there will be no significant effect on my youngest, either. But it will be far more fair for future students, who should not be forced in the spring of the eighth grade year to make decisions as to what language, math, history, or science class to take based on worry about a class rank four years in the future!

In the meantime, class ranks should be taken with a grain of salt.

Mary Taylor

Jeremiah Road, Sandy Hook                                        April 11, 2005