Can a graduating class be described as the "15th Batch"?

Question

Is it correct to describe a group of students who has graduated from school as "15th Batch". It seems that the group has spent 15 years in the school. I saw the phrase on an international school poster in Saudi Arabia. They were celebrating the graduation of the students in the academic year 2022/2023. My question is mainly directed to those who work at American and British schools.

Answer 1

"Batch" for a graduating class is exceedingly uncommon in American English (and British, I believe too). If you were to say "Congrats, 15th Batch" you wouldn't be understood in the US (or Britain). With precious few exceptions, I've only heard the graduating class referred to in reference to the year they graduate; right now (June 2023), the Class of 2023 is graduating. Even when an ordinal is used, it's usually with "class". But this is rare enough that I can't even tell you what number class I graduated in, much less any of the students in the dozens of graduations I've attended.

Using GloWbE, I searched for *th batch and could only find one example in American English:

[Y Combinator, a startup fund,] doesn’t ask about gender (or race) in its application and does not have an exact statistic for the male/female ratio. But up through its 12th batch, the winter 2011 class, co-founder Jessica Livingston (Graham’s wife) estimated that only about 4% of the founders had been women. Then came the summer 2011 batch. Among its 160 founders, instead of the six or seven women founders that would be expected based on the male/female ratio in previous batches, there were only two women.

The meaning of "batch" here is clear from the context.

GloWbE shows that there are a handful of examples in other dialects of English, from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, etc. (It's hard to say with so few examples, but "Batch of [year]" seems to be more popular than "Nth Batch" in these countries.) Additionally, the OED has an entry (no paywall!) for batchmate, which it marks as "Chiefly South Asian and Philippine English" showing examples from Jamaica (exceedingly old but perhaps a one-off), India, and the Philippines.

There is a post-secondary program near me (in the US) that never uses "Class of [year]". This is because it is not traditional schooling; there are multiple classes that graduate every year at different times. Instead, "Class 11" is used to represent the 11th group of graduating students (or, more officially, something like A11, a cryptic combination of one or two letters to designate the campus, and the number class it is). Interestingly, GloWbE surfaced a post about a military program in Singapore that also has several classes per year, but the author does use "batch":

There are four intakes into OCS per year, each comprising of around 250-500 cadets. These intakes are in April(delta, foxtrot, sierra, tango), June/July(bravo, echo, golf), September/October(alpha, sierra, tango) and December(charlie, hotel). Each intake is denoted by the batch number / year, e.g. I was from 45/01 OCC, which means the 45th batch of Officer Cadet Course, 2001 intake.

Searching online, I found an article about another program in the US (this one apparently with only one graduating class per year) that's talking about "Class #30" or "the 30th Anniversary Class" or "the 2022-2023 Leadership Rowan Class". Yet another school in the US celebrated its "22nd graduating class" and another still its "28^th class". Other times, instead of a "class", it may be called a "cohort" as in the "13th cohort" of this American program.