Two years ago, a young woman started to sob in front of Fort Bend ISD Superintendent Charles Dupre.

She was worried she would not be in the top 10 percent of her graduating class, a designation that grants students automatic admission to the state’s flagship universities. She said falling short of that goal could make it difficult for her to get into college, and she had loaded her schedule with difficult Advanced Placement courses to try to meet that threshold.

“I thought, there’s no way this young woman should be feeling this level of stress,” Dupre said. “She should be enjoying her high school.”

Fort Bend is the latest Houston-area school district to change how it ranks students for Texas’ top-10-percent law.

In June, Friendswood ISD told families it no longer would rank students below the top 10 percent, and advised those outside that group to check a box on college applications saying their school does not rank students. Katy ISD implemented a similar policy in August, and Fort Bend ISD followed suit earlier this month.

When Friendswood ISD made the change, district officials said they hoped it would make colleges take a more holistic view of students outside the top-10-percent group, looking at their scores and accolades versus their rank. They also said they hoped students would decide to take more courses that interested them rather than ones that simply would boost their grade point averages.

Friendswood ISD spokeswoman Dayna Owen said the district would know more about the effect of the new policy after it completes a survey of upperclassmen and sees what the coming year’s class registration shows.

“I think we are all very interested since the policy change to see how students feel,” Owen wrote in an email.

In Houston ISD, students ranked in the top 5 percent of their school graduate with “highest honors,” and the next 10 percent receive “honors.” The policy has been unchanged for at least 20 years.

Texas’ top-10-percent rule was signed into law in 1998 by then-Gov. George W. Bush in the hope it would help diversify student bodies at the state’s two flagship universities without using race as part of admissions decisions. Two years prior, the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Texas at Austin could not consider race when admitting students.

Champions of the law hoped it would give students from schools that had high rates of lower-income, non-white and rural students better access to the best schools in the state without having to factor in race.

Some studies, however, have cast doubt on whether the law has accomplished those goals over its 20-year lifespan.

A working paper on the subject was presented earlier this year by Kalena Cortes, an economics professor at Texas A&M University, and Daniel Klasik, an assistant professor of education at the University of North Carolina. It showed little has changed in terms of the demographics of students going to the state’s two flagship schools — the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M — and the high schools that send students to those two colleges.

“What we asked in this paper was, are we seeing more students from more high schools enrolling in flagships?” Klasik said. “And the answer, essentially, was no.”

Their research showed that before and after the law went into effect, 40 percent of high schools consistently sent their seniors to the flagships, while another 15 percent occasionally had their graduates enroll. About 45 percent never sent a student to either school, and schools in that group disproportionately served economically disadvantaged, non-white and rural students.

While the law’s efficacy has been questioned, students across the state remain under pressure to be the one in 10 to earn a top spot at their school. If they want automatic admission into UT, they have to be in the top 6 percent.

As the state continues to balloon in size, Cortes said, competition will only become more intense.

“We have two flagships and those have limited seating, so it’s going to get harder and harder and harder to get into them,” Cortes said, adding that schools like UT still could limit the percentage of top-10-percent students they automatically accept. “What the state should be thinking about is what other institutions could be elevated to a flagship status. We need to think strategically about demographic growth and migration from other states.”

Meanwhile, those increasingly exclusive class rankings weigh on Caitlyn Smith, a 15-year-old sophomore at Friendswood High School.

She made the top-10-percent cut last year but has loaded up her schedule with advanced classes to keep her in that position until she graduates in 2022. Even with her district’s change in how it reports rankings and her dislike of the 10-percent rule, she has not stopped putting pressure on herself to stay in that group.

“It’s extremely stressful to make sure I’m keeping up my rank in high school,” Smith said in December. “But ranking kids doesn’t seem right. It puts so much stress on kids to make sure they’re smart enough for the biggest colleges to look at them, because they still base it on the top 10 percent.”

shelby.webb@chron.com