Does class rank make the grade? Many high schools have stopped ranking students, forcing colleges to put more weight on SAT scores.

Every year, colleges across the country are flooded with thousands of applications, and admissions officers spend countless hours poring over essays, recommendation letters, transcripts, and SAT and ACT scores in search of the perfect candidates.

But something is missing from many applications these days: a class ranking, once an important factor in college-admissions decisions.

It is estimated that nearly 40 percent of high schools no longer rank their students or have stopped giving the information to colleges. These schools hope the change will cut down on competition among their students and force admissions officials to look more closely at each applicant.

TOTAL PICTURE

"When you don't rank, then they have to look at the total child," says Jeanne Friedman, principal of Miami Beach High School, which will end class ranking next year.

Some schools also feel that ranking harms the chances of their good, but not best, students getting into prestigious schools: They say that the gap between a student ranked second and a student ranked 14th can be minuscule, but the one ranked second is more likely to make the cut, and therefore has an unfair advantage.

FRUSTRATED DEANS

Many college officials deplore the shift away from ranking, saying it forces them to make less-informed decisions and essentially recreate an applicant's class rank. This process has left them exasperated.

And when high schools don't provide enough information to re-create rank, some admissions directors say they have little choice but to give more weight to scores on the SAT and other standardized tests.

"The less information a school gives you, the more whimsical our decisions will be," says William M. Shain, dean of undergraduate admissions at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. "And I don't know why a school would do that."

When a high school provides a student's grade-point average without giving class rank or other information that puts the grade in context, it significantly diminishes the meaning of the grade, according to Shain and other admissions directors.

"You've got to position the kids in some relative environment," says Jim Miller, dean of admissions at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

For some, the decline of class rankings represents an opportunity.

"I think it kind of frees us in some ways; it enables us to take the kids who are a joy to teach," says Jennifer Delahunty Britz, admissions dean at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. But that is a distinctly minority view.

Vanderbilt maintains that its admissions rate has been highest for students with a class rank and lowest for those whose schools provided neither a rank nor general data about their grades.

"You're saying your grades don't matter and that you won't tell us what they mean," says Shain. "I think it's an abdication of educational responsibility."

Alan Finder covers education for The Times.