<p>Hayden, Marite's son took classes at Harvard while attending high school. My kid did not take classes at any local colleges because they involve a great deal of travel as well as her time after school and in the evenings involved hours of EC endeavors that she would never give up. When she exceeded the HS curriculum in math, she took college level math through Johns Hopkins long distance, and got HS credit for it (not that she needed credit but she wanted to continue in math). When she went as high as our French curriculum goes, French V by the end of 11th, she took an independent study in French VI with one other accelerated student under the supervision of a French teacher, also for credit. No community college here. </p>
<p>Also, where we live, there is no gaming or jockeying for val status. Being val was never my child's aim. Doing her best in school is the kind of learner she is but that is it. Her curriculum chosen would not change one iota if we had rankings or no rankings. She took the hardest level of classes available because she craves more challenging levels. She accelerated in various subjects due to her learning needs. She sought out indep. studies because she wanted more in those subjects. She did a year long indep. study in drafting and mechanical drawing and AutoCad because she wanted to explore that area as she was discovering a possible college major, architecture. She also was in band, jazz band and jazz theory classes, and took four art courses in HS, plus webpage design. She took the most demanding academic courses our HS offers. Our GPAs were unweighted and so was rank. If anything, her taking of such a demanding courseload of the hardest tracked classes available would have worked against ranking. It did not matter because she wanted those classes. Actually colleges want to see you taking the most challenging course load possible. She would have no matter what because she dislikes classes that are too easy. Also, here you DO have to work hard to get all A's as she had. Val did stand for something. Only one person had a 4.0. She never worked toward being val and never discussed it. She was val in the end but she would not have changed a thing she had done on the way to that point. She did believe that GPA should be weighted because there was no benefit in terms of rankings for those who chose to challenge themselves. The system worked against encouraging students to take the harder classes. Like I said, the students ranked second and third were not in her classes because they took no Honors or AP classes. She would never make that choice but likewise, many would opt to not take the harder classes because there was no reward in terms of things like Honor Roll or ranking.</p>
<p>When my boyfriend was a senior, he had to be "co-val" instead of val, even though his GPA was highest by any method they chose to compute (unweighted, weighted, quality points, what have you). The girl who was second by all these measures was only a few hundredths behind in one of the methods of computation, and her parents threatened to sue the school district if she wasn't allowed to be co-val.</p>
<p>Boyfriend was not apparently too bothered by it (he tends to not sweat the small stuff), but I get the sense that it hurt his feelings a little, as the girl was apparently a friend of his before she and her parents began making a big stink about the whole valedictorian business.</p>
<p>Personally, I came in 13th in my class (we did "top 10" rather than a single val/sal), mostly because our school did it by weighted GPA and I took band, choir, and theatre classes and wasn't willing to play the system. It has had no effect on my success in life. :)</p>
You know, our school stopped calculating early, too. In fact I don't think they calculated anything in the last semester of senior year. Another "glitch" in the system.</p>
<p>My son's preferred college TOLD me that he would have gotten more money if he was #1 or #2 instead of #5 (still top 1%). How ridiculous, especially given the rather random weighting of courses and the fact that a kid taking a study hall would be numerically better off than a kid who took band or computer programming or creative writing. Weird! If some people are grade wh*<strong><em>, then some schools are certainly stat wh</em></strong>*. I'm disappointed in the system. :(</p>
<p>PS - Good for you MollieB! My son refused to play the game too, and is very happy with the valuable experiences he gained through non-weighted courses. Also, except for the money thing, nobody cares what number he was in high school!</p>
<p>Liberty University, the school run by Jerry Falwell, apparently has a debate team that is the real deal. Other than that, I hardly ever see favorable comments about that school here on CC. I'm not aware of many students who are anxious about being admitted there. Years ago, Falwell announced that he would offer full rides to any valedictorian who matriculated at Liberty. That did NOT raise my estimate of the school's academic level.</p>
<p>At my oldest S's hs, (private Jesuit) val is decided by taking the top 10 students gpa wise and then the admin and faculty decides who is val and who is sal. S's year, the kid with the highest gpa ended up sal because the val was this real go getter with internships and volunteerism and such. I don't know if this caused bad blood between the boys or parents, I didn't hear of any drama, but with this subjective way, it seems like it could.</p>
<p>My junior S's public (large suburban) has around 20 vals a year because they do it by weighted grades (4 AP or honors per year max) and all A's. I have thought this was ridiculous because a 89.5 is the same as a 99.9, but I'm happy with it now because S is still in the running :)
They stop calculating after 1st semester senior year, so I guess the spring doesn't matter (except for that caveat that the colleges expect your grades all year to reflect the work you have done all along or they might rescind your acceptance) YIKES!! :/</p>
<p>"BTW, in our area, going to community college means you'd be taking courses no where near as hard as the HS courses. I'm surprised to hear about your areas, where (if I'm understanding some of you correctly) it seems you view attending cc classes as a challenge. Where I live, taking cc classes would be like putting a student from the top track into classes with the bottom track, and being surprised that they get A's. But I guess every place is different."</p>
<p>I second this position. I took 8 classes at the local CC, and the adjustments to HS grades was interesting: the grades earned at the CC were penalized, but the grades earned in a HS dual-credit class were curved by 10 to 24 points (to accomodate the CC students.) Grade inflation in reverse! </p>
<p>The reality is that it is virtually impossible to compare grades from different schools, be it high schools or colleges. While I believe that ranking is an important characteristic of a high school -and that many schools abandon it for the wrong reasons- the manipulations and jockeying for rankings should be reined in. Schools that use policies such as weighing every class taken by IB students or adding weights as high as 50% of a grade should realize the ridicule of their policies. The same thing for schools that allow students to be ranked despite despite a few or no classes at the school. </p>
<p>My favorite system would be completely transparent with grading policies as well as ALL grades made public -albeit restricted to parents and students. Parents should know exactly where their kids stand from the day they start high school to the day they graduate. Abusive policies and jockeying should disappear when brought into the limelight.</p>
<p>Where I live, CC classes are a world easier than high school honors and especially AP classes. They traditionally have not figured into the h.s. GPA at all - until next fall. They will actually be counting the same as honors classes, worth an extra point over regular classes! The only good thing about that is that it will force some of our lazier students to have to study some. Many have just done the bare minimum work necessary to pass the course, knowing that the grade would not affect their GPAs. I still maintain that regular credit and not honors credit is more in keeping with the difficulty level of the class, though. People have to remember that your typical CC student (out of h.s.) is not usually as bright as the h.s. students who take the CC classes with him/her. (Our school does not allow students with low h.s. GPAs to even take the CC classes.)</p>
<p>I agree with Xiggi that ranking is still important, but that grading policies and grades should be readily available to the parents and students throughout their h.s. career. Where we (really those in control) erred with our daughter's situation was in there not being a written policy for us to read or for even the school board to see that told that val/sal grades were figured 9-weeks before the end of the school year. Being rational parents, we did not carry the case any further than a closed session meeting with the school board. (but it was very tempting, just knowing that on the last day of school the val/sal ranks would be reversed!) By the way, my d took all of her classes at the h.s., as did the val of her class.</p>
<p>I kind of like my DD's attitude - "who on earth would want an award that just means you have to give apeech in front of 2000 strangers, that you had to write the last 3 days of high school???" - She finished 3rd, not necessarily accidentally.</p>
<p>What colleges need to do is not use the VAL designation alone to hand out scholarships, it is in a way a cop-out and an easy way to say here you go</p>
<p>As we can all see, each school has different ways of naming the top ten students</p>
<p>So colleges, who spend so much time picking their incoming class needs to spend more time determining who to give scholarships to, and with so much money involved, a bit more time is warranted</p>
<p>A val with a 4.0 weighted is often is "below" as student ranked 8th with a 4.0 unweighted at a different school</p>
<p>So award the VAL the scholarship, while a student ranked lower may deserve it just as much</p>
<p>It is up to the universities to look at their own scholarship programs and update them to reflect the changing highschool criteria</p>
<p>As for the Val not taking any classes, they need to have a designation for that, if she never stepped on campus, her diploma should read something like "district diploma"</p>
<p>same for homeschoolers, I think that would be fair</p>
<p>the val of my class took band as an aide after he fulfilled his fine arts requirement so it wouldn't factor into his gpa (we use weighted averages for ranking). there are other loopholes like taking classes online or during summer school... not to mention taking honors IPC instead of AP Physics, Anatomy and Physiology Honors instead of AP Bio, Calc AB, not Calc BC (note: our val took AP Physics, Calc BC, AP Chem, etc... it's the counselors who made him take band as an aide)</p>
<p>but the nuttiest of them all would have to be what happened to the valedictorian last year... denied the title because she missed more than 6 weeks of school due to hospitalization. </p>
<p>The more I hear, the more I realize how lucky we were in terms of how our hs handled similar situations with my son. Like Marite's son, he took AP Calc in 8th grade and continued with college courses after that. So, a problem arose when our school switched to a weighted grading system when they were in 10th grade, and the rule was that only honors and AP classes taken from 10th grade on would be weighted. Well, since my son had taken all the accelerated/honors math courses long before 10th grade (actually, some in elementary school), that would have meant none of his grades would be weighted. When I went to the school to express concern about this, they agreed that this would work against the spirit of the weighted system, as it would penalize my son for being accelerated. So, they instituted an exception in his case, allowing his courses that were typically taken from 10th grade on, to be weighted. End of story: he was valedictorian, and I believe that he was viewed as deserving of this honor.</p>
<p>Donemom, it's great that the school was willing to do the right thing for your son. My son is accelerated, although not nearly as much as your son or Marite's. He is taking a 9th grade math class as a 7th grader, and next year will take 9th grade biology as an 8th grader. He is going to do EPGY math instead of being in a class, because the accelerated class he's in is moving too slowly. It didn't occur to me to ask how they would handle the math grade next year; I'm just happy that they are willing to let him do this. </p>
<p>There's another aspect to being accelerated that works against kids in terms of GPA and class rank. My son's math grade this year will be on his HS transcript and, I assume, included in his GPA. He has no trouble with the math itself, but his organizational problems influence his grades. For example, he has never lost points on a test for not being able to do the problems because he didn't understand the material, but he has lost points for not being able to do a problem because he didn't have any graph paper, and he's lost points when he's done a problem correctly but put the answer in the wrong place on the answer sheet. This past week he was taking a test, and near the end found that he couldn't do a problem because he didn't have his calculator. Apparently the calculator (he's supposed to have it in class every day) has been missing for weeks. He's been doing the calculations manually, but on this week's test there was something he couldn't do himself - it must have been something like a trig function. He's always ended up with an A for the quarter, but it's always a low A. I assume (please, God!) that in two years he'll have his act together. The fact that he's taking the courses early is bringing his grades down, even though he can handle the material. But I don't consider this a big problem, as long as his grades aren't so low that his college options will be limited. Being valedictorian isn't something he is hoping for, and I can't imagine that it would be a reasonable goal for him to have. </p>
<p>I guess I should find out how GPA/class rank is calculated. I have no idea how our HS does it, whether they weight or not, but I know that some people game the system, and it also seems to me that the most outstanding graduating seniors do not usually include the valedictorian.</p>
<p>Raindrop, I read the story you linked to. It was even worse than I thought - she missed being valedictorian because she missed one particular day in junior year, not even because she missed 6 weeks. I was touched and impressed by her maturity and by the reasonable and supportive attitudes of the other students.</p>
<p>My S's college classes were recorded as Pass/Fail on his transcript. I never got to know his GPA. And since ranking was not even begun until the end of junior year, I never got to know how and even whether he was ranked. But there was nothing at stake for him, and he was glad not to have to make a speech.</p>
<p>NYMomof2, both my children also accelerated and took HS courses in middle school (which is located at the same facility) and so the HS courses taken in seventh/eighth grades are on their HS transcripts and are part of their GPA. Grades, nor rank, were weighted at our HS while my kids attended. My kids were not thinking of rank when choosing courses. They opted to not only take the hardest courses available but had various accomodations made to accelerate, do independent studies, long distance courses, etc. to meet their learning needs, as your child is doing. How it affected GPA or rank never entered into any of their educational planning. Also, where we live, there is no gaming with respect to rank. It just is not something I ever heard of until I read CC. In fact, most of the top students in the school take music and the like, not just academic core classes. They are involved in things like music, and not study halls. Last year's val was very involved in art (went to college for art). My D was val and took band, jazz band, jazz theory, webpage design and four art courses and an indep. study in drafting, while still taking the most challenging courses in every subject and accelerating as well. She took what she needed to take to challenge herself and to also take her interests. All these decisions were based on that alone and not rank and all that stuff. My younger D, whom we never planned on graduating early (already had entered K early as it were), as it turned out wanted to graduate early after 11th grade and the fact that she had accelerated so much in middle school and had many HS credits, allowed her to do so even though that was not the motivation behind taking the courses at the time. She needed to do so for her learning level, as your son is doing. I think that you should stay the course (sorry for the pun) as the bigger issue is meeting your son's learning needs via acceleration and the like. The rest will follow. This is the more important thing, not rank.</p>
<p>My older son had an interesting experience as one of approximately 10 "vals" at his HS. (Everyone with a 4.0 or better was designated a "valedictorian". They all led the graduating class out, but only the 2 highest GPAs had to make speeches.) The guidance counselor assigned as liaison with this group basically had never meet them before because they never got into trouble. The counselor essentially accused them all of cheating, because she did not see how anyone could get such good grades. Needless to say, my older son does not have especailly fond memories of his HS.</p>
<p>Soozievt, I agree that my son's educational needs are the only factor influencing our decisions. I hadn't thought until recently about effects of his non-traditional program (he also has independent projects in science, having tested out of the 7th grade course, and in French this year) on his GPA. It occurred to me that perhaps I should worry a little about it, because I understand that some colleges won't even consider students who are not in the top XX% of their HS class. But I'm really just musing here, grades are not an overriding concern for us. My son, in fact, complains about his classmates' excessive concern about grades, as opposed to learning. His pet peeve is the constant refrain, "Is this going to be on the test?", that he hears all day. He is also annoyed that any class time is spent on strategy for standardized tests (e.g., if you can narrow the choices down to two, you should guess). He believes that trying to get credit for something you don't know is immoral, and that teachers have no business helping students do it! </p>
<p>You're lucky to live in a reasonable community. You wouldn't believe what goes on around here. NY vs VT, I guess.</p>
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The guidance counselor assigned as liaison with this group basically had never meet them before because they never got into trouble. The counselor essentially accused them all of cheating, because she did not see how anyone could get such good grades.
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<p>A good thing the students had never met that particular GC before! The woman sounds downright poisonous.</p>
<p>NYMomof2....colleges will look at the whole picture. Rank is just one piece. The fact that your son has challenged himself, taken indep. studies, accelerated, etc. says plenty about him as a learner. While you are putting his learning needs at the forefront (good), I am sure the rest will follow. Someone who loves learning and craves challenges and forges an educational path that is not common, all will be seen in a positive light. I know that our GC commented about these sorts of things on his report on my girls' college applications. </p>
<p>I would not say we live in a reasonable community. I'd say we don't live in nearly as a competitive community as I have learned about either via CC or through my kids' friends in other states and more affluent communities where talk of colleges starts young, WHERE you are going to college is a biggy, where there is a big push to do whatever you have to to get into an Ivy or the like, where strategizing for rank is a topic, and on and on. It is not like that here, thank goodness. I may talk on CC about colleges and all the related issues but it was barely a topic amongst others in my community and their kids were not applying to the same places as my kids. My kids never felt in competition with anyone at school. They competed with themselves. They had high standards for themselves and goals for themselves. Where they applied to college was fairly quiet. Where they were going basically came up in April of their last year when people started talking of plans for after graduation. Certainly the idea of trying for elite colleges is nil in our community. Each year, perhaps one or two kids from the HS go to a highly selective college (year before D1 had a Dartmouth and a Penn, my D's year had her at Brown, and last year and this year may have no Ivies, for example) and then a handful go to some very selective schools (ie., Colby, Middlebury, Georgetown, McGill, Smith, NYU, BU) and then it peters off. Many top students end up at UVM which is a very good school by the way. Many TOP students end up at schools that are not as selective like Norwich, Syracuse, Emerson, Elizabethtown, UNH, Northeastern, Center College, Skidmore, St. Lawrence. I am just talking of the top students, not the majority of students.</p>
<p>It's interesting to me that many high schools use college course grades in calculating GPA's . Our hs did not even request info about the grades my son received (from EPGY). That transcript was totally independent. Maybe that's because my son only took college math courses; in all other subjects, he took the regular honors/AP track that our school offered. So his GPA was calculated based on hs classes only, (including those math classes he took before officially entering hs). That seemed to be a fair process, since college classes are not necessarily comparable to classes --even AP's--offered in hs.</p>