There has not been a valedictorian at Mahwah High School in nearly 20 years.

The school scrapped the honorific in favor of the Pride and Spirit Award, an honor that recognizes the top two graduating students not by their GPA but by their leadership, service and enthusiasm.

An increasing number of high schools around the nation have bucked the tradition of naming a valedictorian or ranking graduating students. “The trend is class rank is simply going the way of the dinosaur,” said David Hawkins, executive director for educational content and policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “It’s not completely extinct yet, but it doesn’t seem likely to surge.”

In New Jersey, valedictorians abound but class rankings have become significantly less common. Ocean City High School is graduating its first class without rank on Monday. Vineland voted to eliminate class rank beginning with the class of 2020.

Janet Bamford, a spokeswoman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, said most of the districts that have repealed class rank appear to be in southern New Jersey but the trend is widespread.

The reasons behind it are typically the same: the difference between the grade-point averages of students can be so minuscule that it renders the ranking meaningless, the competition for rank can drive up student stress, and the tendency to award more weight to honors and Advanced Placement classes can discourage students from enrolling in electives such as art or music, she said.

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Some schools also recognize that environmental factors such as family income and parental level of education can affect student performance, Hawkins said.

“Many educators and administrators are viewing zero-sum competition — selecting just one student or trying to stack students on top of each other — as not a really educationally appropriate way to recognize high achievement,” he said.

Pascack Hills High School eliminated class rankings in 2005, though it still selects a valedictorian and salutatorian as part of a longstanding tradition, said Principal Glenn deMarrais.

“We decided that we didn’t want academic achievement to be a competition,” he said. “Anything that we can do that might positively impact the culture and climate of wellness, we think is a good thing. We think it’s in the best interest of our kids.”

Jeff Gant, director of undergraduate admissions at Montclair State University, noticed a steep drop in the number of high schools reporting class rank over the last decade. Only about 40 percent of submitted transcripts now include the number.

Montclair State prefers to have class rankings, because they provide additional context and are used by college ranking services, including U.S. News & World Report, he said, but the school has adjusted its admissions process to reflect high schools' changing policies.

“It’s not necessarily a problematic issue in admissions, it’s just that it forces institutions to find other equitable criteria on which to evaluate candidates for admission,” Gant said. “Our admission processes have adapted to trends, like reporting class rank on transcripts, and found other performance indicators and factors.”

Rutgers University-New Brunswick stopped rank consideration for admissions several years ago due to the large number of high schools that do not use it, said Neal Buccino, a spokesman for the school.

“We consider individual grades in each academic course and overall cumulative grade-point average for each applicant,” he wrote in a statement. “We also seek to understand the degree to which students challenge themselves in the context of the high school’s curriculum."

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