A bipartisan law approved last month will require most high schools in Dane County, including Madison’s, to create class rankings at a time when the practice is on the wane and in a way that can ignore the difficulty of the classes students choose to take.
But the Republican author of the measure said changes in district grading practices and future amendments to the law could address those problems and, in any case, the law will give college-bound students more certainty about getting into Universities of Wisconsin institutions, which have been reluctant to disclose admissions criteria.
The Republican-backed bill, signed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Feb. 20, requires the state’s flagship public university, UW-Madison, to accept all students who rank in the top 5% of their classes at the end of their junior year, and the 12 regional UW campuses to take all those who rank in the top 10%.
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Class rankings, however, are increasingly a relic of a different education era, according to the National Association of Secondary School Principals, which points to concerns among school leaders, parents and school boards “that limited access to advanced classes and unevenness of school grading policies could lead to large differences in class rank — and hurt student prospects for admission” to college.
Among the 16 school districts wholly or partially in Dane County, for example, only seven continue to calculate class rank, although students at the very top are ranked to satisfy application requirements for various scholarships.
Madison School District spokesperson Ian Folger said the district stopped including class rank on high school transcripts in 2009 after a pilot program that began nine years before that.
“This decision was informed by several (district)-led surveys of colleges and universities that revealed no indication of students without class rank being disadvantaged in the admissions process,” he said.
As introduced, the bill that became 2023 Act 95 required schools to “establish a method for ranking pupils on the basis of academic achievement, which may take into account the pupil’s grade point average, ACT examination score, course work, and other measures of academic achievement or scholastic merit.”
But under an amendment adopted before final passage, the law now says the “sole criterion” for determining class rank “shall be the pupil’s grade point average.”
That means students who avoid honors or advanced placement classes but get lots of A’s could be ranked more highly than students who challenge themselves with more difficult classes but get a few B’s sprinkled in. Although as Belleville School District administrator Nate Perry pointed out, typically the students getting high grades are the same students taking more challenging courses.
Evers’ office declined to answer questions about the law and directed the Wisconsin State Journal to UW and the bill’s authors.
The bill’s primary author, Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, said school districts have the option of adopting so-called weighted grading systems to account for class difficulty in coming up with rankings.
Such systems assign extra GPA credit to grades for honors or AP classes.
Currently, only three of the Dane County districts that responded to the State Journal’s inquiries reported having a grading system that sought to take course rigor into account when calculating GPA, although at least two had so-called laude systems that consider course rigor in ranking the very top students.
Open to tweaks
In a statement, Cabral-Guevara called the law “the result of extensive negotiations between many stakeholders, including the Universities of Wisconsin” but said she was open to “discussions on how to build on Act 95.”
The new required-admissions system is a “vast improvement,” she said, to what existed before.
“Their previous admissions practices were hidden behind redacted documents,” she said. “Now students have something to aim for.”
Cabral-Guevara’s office pointed to a Sept. 17, 2021, response to a public records request from Rep. David Murphy, R-Greenville, a cosponsor of the class-ranking bill, to UW-Madison for documents detailing the criteria it uses to admit students.
What his office got back were several documents marked for “internal use only” or “confidential” that laid out specific criteria for admission, including columns identifying “rating value,” “description” and “benchmark” in areas including “high school record” and “positive campus contributions,” but with the specifics within each column blacked out.
Similarly, much of a section describing “non-cognitive competencies” considered in admission decisions, contained in a document called “Undergraduate Admissions Holistic Review: Principles,” is blacked out.
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UW-Madison Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Nancy K. Lynch explained the redactions as attempts to protect trade secrets, the identities of specific admissions officials and UW-Madison’s “competitive position ... vis-a–vis its peer institutions.”
She also said that making such criteria public “would have a deleterious effect on the public’s interest in maintaining a fair and equitable application review process.”
“If this information were publicly released, it would likely have the effect of harming those applicants who did not or could not access such information, which would place those applicants at a significant disadvantage when applying to UW-Madison,” she said.
UW-Madison spokesperson John Lucas said Friday that, “by following a holistic admissions process, UW-Madison has for many years admitted the vast majority of Wisconsin’s most talented and promising students” and that under the new law, “UW–Madison remains committed to helping enroll our state’s best and brightest students.”
Universities of Wisconsin spokesperson Mark Pitsch did not respond to an email asking if the system would similarly decline to publicly share detailed admissions criteria for the other four-year campuses.