Ratings and Rankings: The Illusions of Student Measurement without Context

Americans like to rank. We like standings. We assign scores - numerical ones - to sort and select our favorites, best, and worst. We make decisions based on polls that rank songs, movies, restaurants, places to live or retire, and colleges to attend.

We like to keep score, even though how we measure often fails to reveal truths about the quality of the rating. We want to believe in what the numbers seem to tell us about who is at the top or bottom. We also like to rank our students and our schools. High schools use complex formulae to identify valedictorians, at times separating the top-ranking student whose “GPA” was .001 higher than the salutatorian and others in the “top” ten and even beyond.