Monday, December 18, 2017, The Roaring Gazette sat down with VBCPS Superintendent Dr. Spence to discuss the role of class rank in the Virginia Beach City Public Schools system.

Despite the rumors surfacing in Tallwood that the district was considering getting rid of class rank, superintendent Dr. Aaron C. Spence cleared the air, stating, “We will likely never get rid of class rank, because some colleges and universities require it.”

However, that has not kept the district from discussing the problems surrounding the use of class rank, such as the fact that it is not entirely wholistic, and in an age where colleges are favoring personal essays, participation in extracurricular activities and rigor of coursework over SAT scores or GPA in isolation, the need to glorify class rank is dissipating.

“We feel class rank is becoming less important to colleges and universities – that’s what we’ve been told – they’re more interested in what are the classes you’ve been taking. Are you taking the toughest classes available? Have you done well in those classes? Are you engaged in things outside of school that are of interest to you? So they’re looking at a bigger picture of who the student is and class rank doesn’t really tell that,” began Dr. Spence.

Class rank is a measure of how a student’s performance compares to other students in his or her class, using GPA, and it is not always the most telling sign of a student’s work ethic or class room engagement relative to their peers.

“The other piece of that is that class rank creates some difficulty within some schools because we have academy students and non-academy students and, depending on where you go to school, you could be … the very best non-academy student, but be the 30th student in your class based off being in competition with academy students. And actually the opposite of that happens in some schools, where the academy programs don’t have a lot of AP classes,” continued Dr. Spence.

There is a fear that class rank fosters an environment in which students take classes merely to get the weight and surpass their peers as opposed to taking courses that genuinely interest them. Likewise, there are students who decide not to take a challenging class that they are actually interested in because it could drop their GPA.

Dr. Spence mentioned implementing a method of recognizing academic achievement that could possibly bypass this unhealthy competition among students and lack of learning for learning’s sake. Mimicking the college system, it would recognize every single student able to reach certain GPA milestones, likely, 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0 and higher.

“I think we would like to make a recommendation to the board, that we keep class rank. We just don’t publish it,” states Dr. Spence.

The concept of encouraging students to put less emphasis on class rank is an ideal shared by some of the staff here at Tallwood High School.

“I think that some students get really hung up on comparing themselves to others. I think that where they are in this school may be really different than where they are in a different school , so I know that a lot of colleges are putting less and less weight behind class rank and I kind of feel like students should do the same because it compares students to other students in their school but it doesn’t give us a great understanding of how much that student understands, how prepared they are for the real world, so I think what it tells us is really limited,” states Mr. David Holland, US Government & Politics and AP US Government & Politics teacher.

Click here to access other articles in Volume 3, Issue 5 of The Roaring Gazette.