The Lyons Township High School Board voted Monday to eliminate class rank in 2017, a change proponents say will help many of the school’s students get into college.
The class of 2017 will be the first to graduate without class rank, a valedictorian or a salutatorian, according to the proposal. The school will also start reporting its top, mean and bottom grade-point average score on its school profile. School staff will work to develop an alternative way to honor top students by this fall, using the cum laude system of colleges as its model.
“For me it comes down to what puts our kids in the best possible situation for the admissions process,” said Superintendent Timothy Kilrea, who researched the proposal.
Kilrea noted many other schools in the area have dropped class ranks, and he spoke with admissions officers at area colleges who now view rankings as less important than they once were. High schools in Hinsdale, Wheaton, Arlington Heights, Lake Zurich, Naperville, Deerfield, Highland Park and elsewhere have dropped the class rank system.
But school board member George Dougherty, who cast the sole vote against the proposal, said he had spoken with admissions officers at Northwestern University and elsewhere who said class rank is still an important measure.
Dougherty called the proposal to remove class rank excessively rigid, raising concerns that the district would give students no way to demonstrate their class rank to colleges if it could help them get in.
“We should try to help and empower students trying to obtain their goals, not restrict them unnecessarily,” he said.
Scott Eggerding, the district’s curriculum and instruction director, has said the school’s large population and its high average GPA can skew some good students’ achievements when viewed through the lens of class rank. The school has about 4,000 students, or about 1,000 per class.
The average GPA at the school is 2.93, according to Eggerding. Factoring in the weighted grades that come from honors and accelerated courses, the average rises to 3.27, he said. A student with a 4.0 weighted GPA might rank around 200th in the class, he said.
The district formed a task force early this year to investigate class rank after the school’s Community Advisory Council recommended eliminating it. The task force agreed with the Council, and the school’s administrators supported eliminating class rank.
Some board members expressed reservations about the change, saying any attempt to see into the future regarding what is best for students is fraught with uncertainty.
“I’m not confident that we realize what the unintended consequences would be,” Board President Mark Pera said. As an example, he questioned whether eliminating class rank would help a student who did well in classes but poorly on the ACT test, a standard college entrance exam.
Pera said he decided to vote in line with the staff recommendation supporting the change.
“I’m hopefully confident that it’s going to turn out to be in the best interest of our kids,” he said.
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