Same reply -- being the top academic student doesn't automatically make one the best performer in the military side of Starfleet. Anyway, I don't agree that Saavik would automatically be the top student just because of who her mentor was. If anything, she struck me as somewhat naive and inflexible, still struggling to fit into a human-dominated organization and adapt to her colleagues' ways of thinking. She had "the book" memorized, but hadn't learned how to adapt its rules to more ambiguous real-world situations. That's hardly top-of-the-class material.
Also, if you acknowledge her characterization in the tie-in fiction, Saavik had a traumatic, feral upbringing and struggled to learn emotional control. She was far from being the perfect Vulcan. She may have had discipline problems, earned demerits on her record, or (like me in my school days) had trouble overcoming her personal turmoil to focus on academics. It's simplistic to assume that just being Vulcan or just being Spock's student would automatically guarantee that she was the best. People are more individual than that.
In any case, being "on top" is an arbitrary standard. Our culture is too attached to the simpleminded idea that there has to be one "winner" and anything less is worthless. That's silly. There can be many entities in a group who excel in a variety of ways. Any standard for declaring only one of them the "winner" is bound to be arbitrary and artificial, and should not be assigned too much importance. (Which is why I stopped taking awards seriously decades ago. Look at how consistently the Emmys snubbed TNG and DS9 in the non-technical categories even though they had much of the best acting, writing, and directing in the industry.)
