Seaholm High School—an institution known for its high academic standards, impressive test scores, and dedicated students—may be keeping its students from scholarship money, due to what some are calling a flawed policy.
Unlike most public high schools in the United States, Seaholm does not use a class ranking system.
“It’s board policy,” said Seaholm counselor Julie Gould.
Class rank continues to appear on all college applications, as well as scholarship and financial aid forms.
For most colleges and universities, if a high school doesn’t have a class rank, they adapt to the circumstances, by considering other factors such as GPA and test scores.
Miami University of Ohio has many scholarship opportunities for incoming students. Each scholarship has different requirements for the amount of money awarded. The main factor is class rank.
And what if the school doesn’t have a class ranking system? The student cannot receive, yet alone qualify, for the scholarship.
For years, Miami’s Non-Resident Scholarship was given to many students from Seaholm. In order to receive the money, the student must have a 3.5 GPA and at least a 29 on the ACT. However, this year was the first that class rank was a factor.
Katherine Beck, a Seaholm senior attending Miami next year, would have qualified for the scholarship if Seaholm ranked students.
“While looking at college applications, I would always get a little frustrated when I was asked to put down my rank,” said Beck. “Seaholm obviously doesn’t include this important aspect.”
Assistant Director of Financial Aid at Miami, Beth Johnson, admits, “It does hurt students trying to receive the scholarship if their high school doesn’t rank.”
Using class rank as a factor in the process limits the number of students receiving the scholarship, which saves the state of Ohio money.
“We have to draw a line somewhere, especially because it’s out of state students,” said Johnson. “There’s a limited amount of money because the whole scholarship is paid for by state funds.”
A class rank is a simple idea. For each grade, students are ranked from highest grade point average to lowest grade point average. So instead of receiving just A’s, B’s, and C’s on your report card, you’d receive a number, marking your placement in the class.
Ranking can cause high anxiety and intense competition among students, one of the main reasons nearly 40% of high schools around the country have done away with them.
High school administrators also thought that colleges were failing to view students in their full context, when they used “shortcuts” like class rank.
But according to Johnson, “It’s basically something we have to do.”
In all the years that Miami has offered the Non-Ohio Resident Scholarship, the financial aid and scholarship office has never really been able to tell where the student falls, compared to others.
“College is a whole new realm, and it’s much more competitive than high school,” said Johnson. “We have to know where the student stands and class rank is the best way for us to know.”
In an academically rigorous and competitive high school, like Seaholm, class rank can make a student seem less qualified than they are.
“So many students have really high GPAs here,” said Gould. “Class rank doesn’t bode well for them.”
Sometimes students are separated in class rankings by a few hundredths of a point in a four-point grading system. In these schools, for example, the gap between a student ranked second and one ranked 14th can be minuscule.
“It’s good we don’t rank,” said Gould. “If we did, the students hoping to get the Miami scholarship may not get it at all because their rank is low, when in fact, their GPA is high.”
While schools that don’t rank may think that they’re helping their students, college admissions officers disagree. In fact, the strategy can backfire.
According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), when high schools do not provide enough general information to recreate the class rank calculation (with a distribution of grade averages for an entire senior class), many admissions directors have little choice but to give more weight to SAT and ACT scores.
In order to put students in some perspective, Seaholm sends out a school profile to colleges that show a breakdown of GPAs from the previous graduating class.
According to this year’s profile, 35 students in the 2007 graduating class had a GPA ranging from 4.0 to 4.6 (weighted).
In fact, 219 of the 311 graduating seniors had above a 3.0.
This means that a student could have a B average and be in the bottom 30% of the class.
As shown with these statistics, “ranking is not as helpful as we think it might be,” said Gould.
In rare cases, Miami does give the Non-Ohio Resident Scholarship to students without a class rank—but their test scores and GPA must be exceptional.
“If a student has a near-perfect ACT score, or a 4.0 GPA, but their high school doesn’t rank, we’re still going to consider them,” said Johnson.
“That seems really unfair,” said senior Max Klindt, who will also be attending Miami next year.
However, when a high school provides a student’s grade point average without giving class rank or other information that puts the grade in context, it significantly diminishes the meaning of the grade.
This is especially true at Seaholm where “high grades are the norm,” according to Beck.
“So if you were to have just ‘good’ grades, you wouldn’t rank very highly, while those same grades may have you near the top of the class at another high school,” said Beck.
Despite Beck and Klindt both not receiving scholarship from Miami, they are in agreement that Seaholm students benefit in the long run from no class rank.
“Ranking students in a very prestigious class seems like it could create a false perception towards college admissions counselors who would be looking at your transcript,” said Klindt.
“Obviously, Seaholm has had great success when it comes to college admissions, so the non-ranking system seems to be working so far,” said Beck.
