> What is important is them knowing how to improve, not how they rank against their peers.

That's not true, though. What's important in the current system is your GPA, which is sometimes correlated to your rank in the class (curved grades being the most direct correlation).

What you're asking for is for the system to change. What I'm asking for is for professors to not ignore that the system exists and to recognize that the incentives are not what they'd like them to be.