There were 30 students in Vijay Mehta's high school class -- all highly gifted, and all fighting for a place in the coveted top 10 percent of their class. In the end, only three of them could make it.
"Class ranking was a big issue for most students in my class," said Mehta, who graduated from Bartow High School in Bartow, Fla., and is now a Wharton and College sophomore.
"You could take your GPA and go to another high school and be the valedictorian, but at my school, what separated the students were a hundredth or a thousandth of a point."
Mehta is one of many students who had to endure fierce competition to make it into the top tiers of their high school class ranks. Amidst the already intense academic environment that most high schools foster these days, the added concern about class ranking is just another stress.
Fortunately, class ranking -- a once-common gauge that college admissions officers have used to determine a high school student's academic achievement -- is becoming outdated.
Over the past decade, more and more high schools have stopped seeding their students based on GPAs, shifting the focus away from a number and toward a bigger academic profile.
As at many other top universities, this trend is becoming increasingly pronounced at Penn.
"I would say that in our pool of applicants, half of the students aren't ranked," Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson said. "We try to give students the benefit of the doubt, and we realize that the high school profile of a student is more important than a single number."
But these growing numbers of unranked students are a relatively new concept. It wasn't until 1993, when the National Association of Secondary School Principles released a study of college admissions procedures, that outlooks on class ranking began to change.
The association's study noted the extreme importance of grade point average, class rank and weighted grades in making admissions decisions. In other words, many colleges were disregarding their applicants' full profiles and looking at numbers alone.
Since then, more and more high schools have chosen to abolish their ranking policies, as they believe there is more to students than how they compare to their peers.
Hunter College High School in New York, a magnet school, was one of the first to abolish its class ranking system. Its student body, drawn from a small percentile of highly gifted students in New York City, is skewed already -- ranking them further just didn't seem right.
Understandably, college admissions offices did not receive this decision well when it was made.
"When we stopped ranking our students, many colleges tried to push us to give them the numbers and percentiles that they wanted," said Beverly Lenny, the chairwoman of the counseling services department at Hunter College. "Our philosophy has been that the colleges should look into the context of the transcript."
While Hunter College's decision to eliminate its ranking system was based more on the consistent excellence of its student body, other high schools that followed in its footsteps had other reasons for veering away from the numbers.
South Side High School in Rockville Center, N.Y., recently chose to stop ranking its students for another reason -- namely the competitiveness among already high-caliber students.
"When you rank students, the difference in the numbers could be within just a thousandth of a point," said Laurie Levy, a guidance counselor at South Side High School. "So many of our students are busy with academic and extracurricular activities that we wanted colleges to take into consideration more than just a number."
Essentially, in highly competitive high schools, the difference between someone in the top tenth percentile and the top twentieth percentile may be a fraction of a point. Yet, college admissions offices frequently use this minutiae to compare their applicants.
Joyce Smith, the executive director of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, has witnessed the stress that class ranking systems can induce.
"Over the past three or four years I have gotten more calls from principals and counselors because of lawsuits," she said. "If parents believe that their child must be number one, two, or three to be admitted into college, they will fight, and sometimes even sue."
In the light of these increased aversions to class ranking, colleges have acquired other ways to determine applicants' achievement in high school. At Penn, for example, the admissions office has designed its own formula to rank its prospective students.
"We have developed our own converted ranking system that looks at a student's grades, class standing and SAT scores," Stetson said. "This number, which falls between 200 and 800, is what we use for our applicants."
Stetson explained that these methods do not put any student, ranked or unranked, at a disadvantage.
"We try to give students the benefit of the doubt," he said.
Lincoln Park High School in Chicago chooses to keep ranking its students because administrators there have confidence that colleges will look beyond the numbers.
"What I've found is that it doesn't make a difference what number you are in your class," said Dean Straussberger, a guidance counselor at Lincoln Park High School. "Colleges can tell by our high school's profile that there's not much of a difference between the top-ranking students -- they just have to pick the ones that they want."
Woodlands High School, which is outside of Houston, has chosen to continue ranking its students for another reason: Texas' "Ten Percent Rule."
This policy automatically allows for students in the top percent of their high school class to gain automatic admittance to any state university. If a high school chooses not to rank its students, none will be eligible for the Ten Percent Rule.
"It is an advantage for us to rank, because more students will be admitted into a UT school," said Sherry Sunderman, the lead counselor at Woodlands High School.
But Wharton junior Thomas Fan, a Hunter College High School graduate, said the fact that his school did not rank took some of the pressure off.
"Because I wasn't ranked, I was a little less concerned," Fan said. "I did feel that there was definitely a lot of academic pressure anyway, but without the number, I was able to focus more on my workload."
