Who Cares About Class Rank?
Aaron Cheris
Issue date: 10/15/01 Section: Opinions
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Like many of you, one of the major reasons that I chose Stanford over Harvard was the emphasis on cooperation over competition. So far, the Stanford experience has met and perhaps even exceeded my expectations of the levels of coordination and teamwork. It is with this as a backdrop that I say that the current hot topics of class rank posting and GPA recognition have received far too much attention. While there are strong opinions on both sides of this issue, I subscribe to neither extreme. This brief treatise is to express the opinion that “I don’t care” and in the end I hope most of you ultimately won’t either.
To start, from the administration and faculty perspectives, student learning is hopefully their primary goal (I hope that most of the students have that somewhere on their priority lists as well). I take it as axiomatic that people learn more if they try harder, and it is generally accepted that people try harder in graded classes vs. pass/fail classes. Even the most noble Platonic philosopher kings among us are at least partially extrinsically motivated. Therefore, if a subset of more extrinsically motivated people would like to know their class rank in order to gauge their relative position and perhaps encourage them to excel, then so be it. Let the school give students access to that information (besides, if an enterprising MBA wanted to estimate their class rank, given that all classes are forced curve, it would not be that difficult; a good EXTEND model would do the trick).
As for me, I won’t be looking at the information, because I committed not to via my vote, and because knowing my rank would not change my behavior in any way. My hope is that other people won’t change their behavior either. Therein lies the trick. If people’s behavior really will change given this new information, then they never truly bought into the cooperative environment to begin with; and while ignorance is bliss, I would prefer that people do the ‘right thing’ not out of ignorance but out of higher senses of community, purpose and cooperation. Remember, the culture is what we let it be, so there need not be any slippery slope towards cutthroat competitiveness. So in closing, if you really want the GSB culture to continue to flourish as a haven for collaboration, the best way to think about these grading issues is to say to yourself, “I don’t care”.
To start, from the administration and faculty perspectives, student learning is hopefully their primary goal (I hope that most of the students have that somewhere on their priority lists as well). I take it as axiomatic that people learn more if they try harder, and it is generally accepted that people try harder in graded classes vs. pass/fail classes. Even the most noble Platonic philosopher kings among us are at least partially extrinsically motivated. Therefore, if a subset of more extrinsically motivated people would like to know their class rank in order to gauge their relative position and perhaps encourage them to excel, then so be it. Let the school give students access to that information (besides, if an enterprising MBA wanted to estimate their class rank, given that all classes are forced curve, it would not be that difficult; a good EXTEND model would do the trick).
As for me, I won’t be looking at the information, because I committed not to via my vote, and because knowing my rank would not change my behavior in any way. My hope is that other people won’t change their behavior either. Therein lies the trick. If people’s behavior really will change given this new information, then they never truly bought into the cooperative environment to begin with; and while ignorance is bliss, I would prefer that people do the ‘right thing’ not out of ignorance but out of higher senses of community, purpose and cooperation. Remember, the culture is what we let it be, so there need not be any slippery slope towards cutthroat competitiveness. So in closing, if you really want the GSB culture to continue to flourish as a haven for collaboration, the best way to think about these grading issues is to say to yourself, “I don’t care”.