Many schools rank their students based on intelligence to get the students motivated to do better in school. The school can do this in a variety of ways, from shooting the parents an e-mail, to giving the students slips of paper with their personal ranking on them.

The districts believe that this will encourage people to do better, and causes a healthy competition. It makes the schools smartest pupils feel good about themselves and makes them want to continue their well-rewarded efforts. Their families are proud of them and they make the school seem to be doing well. Nothing wrong with this, right? Wrong.

Even though there seem to be many benefits, there are also quite a few down sides. The students who are not doing as well as others in school are embarrassed. And giving them the definite knowledge that they are not the smartest at the school will make them feel like since they are already at the bottom, there is no need to even try anymore. Most of the time ranking them only makes them feel stupid, not competitive. Thus defeating the purpose of the whole thing.

What if the school was not performing their duty to teach America’s future leaders? What if the students who are doing well, are doing well without the motivation or proper teaching of their instructors? Then the school would be getting an unfair ranking against the rest of the schools in their districts. But, if their top student appears to have a high GPA, the district will figure that the rest of the students are just lazy, and the school deserves the ranking, not that it is the fault of the teachers. Giving the school the appearance of doing their job well and to the best of their abilities.

In the end, personal ranking against the students can be beneficial, but can also cause some students to do worse in school and give up on achieving their goals in life. So should schools really rank students based on their academic abilities? The answer is simple, no. If students want to do well in school, they should be able to do this with the help of family and through themselves wanting it. As for the students who are not given this at home, and for those who are, the teachers should be motivating them to do well and to offer them tutoring if they still are not doing well.