【简答题】

(66) Application files are piled highly this month in colleges across the country. (67) Admissions officers are poring essays and recommendation letters, scouring transcripts and standardized test scores.
(68) But anything is missing from many applications: a class ranking, once a major component in admissions decisions.
In the cat-and-mouse maneuvering over admission to prestigious colleges and universities, (69) thousands of high schools have simply stopped providing that information, concluding it could harm the chances of their very better, but not best, students.
(70) Canny college officials, in turn, have found a tactical way to response. (71) Using broad data that high schools often provide, like a distribution of grade averages for entire senior class, they essentially recreate an applicant’s class rank.
(72) The process has left them exasperating.
(73) “If we’re looking at your son or daughter and you want us to know that they are among the best in their school, with a rank we don’t necessarily know that,” said Jim Bock, dean of admissions and financial aid at Swarthmore College.
(74) Admissions directors say strategy can backfire. When high schools do not provide enough general information to recreate the class rank calculation, (75) many admissions directors say they have little choice and to do something virtually no one wants them to do: give more weight to scores on the SAT and other standardized exams.