"If you're in the middle range, a difference of just one point could put you several hundred places apart..."
That was true. After all, the largest number of students fell within the middle range academically. Unlike them, although neither Utaha Kasumigaoka nor Yukino Yukinoshita could compare to Sogo Doma, both were the kind of exemplary children other people's parents loved to talk about—undisputed top students, the cream of the crop.
As the name implied, there could not be many people at the top. Even if one top student scored over ten points more than the others, their rankings would not be that far apart. After all, ordinary students simply could not compete with people like them. The most direct example was this:
The Doma siblings had both taken first place in their grade with perfect scores in every subject. Thus, if second place were compared with the two of them by score alone, they would have to be at least twenty or thirty points behind—sometimes perhaps even forty or fifty points behind. Yet in terms of ranking, second place was only one rank below their shared first place.
Hm? Why bring this up?
It was simple. Before transferring to Toyogasaki, Yukino Yukinoshita had always ranked first at Sobu High. Second place had likewise been dozens of points behind her, but she had never considered a gap of several dozen points to be much. In her eyes, it was merely a hurdle that could be crossed with a little more effort—
At the very least, if someone from Sobu High came to her—as the head of the Service Club—and asked her to help improve their grades, she was seventy or eighty percent confident she could help them score about the same as her, or even higher. Of course, if that happened,