<p>OhioMom - Broomhilda wasn’t my brilliant idea; it was used upthread by someone else and I merely stole, er, re-appropriated it.</p>
<p>I want to add something that is a bit off topic. lol Does it ever help a student in the college search to have recognition and awards made common knowledge? And especially to be interviewed by a newspaper? Any information can be sent to the colleges without letting the whole world know. Even in the case of national awards, most people don’t pay attention if it doesn’t affect their own children. I don’t see how this possibly helps the student prior to college acceptances arriving and a school being chosen.</p>
<p>ymmv but this thread just brought that to mind 
and lots of you will be dealing with this issue very soon.</p>
<p>OP – I am sorry that you feel your son’s achievements may be slighted, but it sounds like he has many other things going for him that will accord him recognition. Isn’t this somewhat similar to missing out on National Merit semifinalist by one point? Disappointing, but you move on. Also, won’t he have already applied to colleges before valedictorian status is conferred?</p>
<p>FWIW --at our high school, all seniors with a 4.0 or above at the end of the year are named valedictiorians. AP students have no weighted electives, but IB electives (art, theater etc.) are weighted. Some students do not take AP or IB at all, and some AP students take their electives Pass/Fail so as not to “drag their GPAs down.” It can drive you crazy if you let it. Don’t let it.</p>
<p>I graduated more than 30 years ago, and just learned (or noticed) this year via a FB posting, who my valedictorian was! Most people just don’t care who the valedictorian is, imo.</p>
<p>Bay: Like you, I have no recollection who my HS val or sal were, so long ago. I can’t even tell you whether we had such titles. (Obviously, I was not one of those in the running either!)</p>
<p>It is better to take the high road, as others have stated. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), life isn’t fair. It’s times like these that test us and allow us to develop our character.</p>
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<p>This continues to beg the question - why is it so important to get recognition “in the community”? For both myself and my kids, I considered high school something that you just have to get through to get to the prize - which is going to a (good) college. They probably won’t ever see 99.9% of their high school classmates ever again, because they are on to bigger and better things and they’ve been brought up to have bigger horizons than most of these other kids. So if they aren’t “recognized” by people they won’t ever see again … oh well. As long as colleges recognize their accomplishments - that’s all that counts, IMO. Nothing wrong with flying under the radar screen, IMO.</p>
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<p>High school is also four years of a person’s life, and those years are as real and meaningful as any others. </p>
<p>And some people maintain high school friendships long after they graduate. My 25-year-old son is flying to the other side of the country in a couple of weeks to attend the wedding of a high school friend whom he still stays in touch with.</p>
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<p>I vehemently object to attendance awards because they encourage students to come to school while ill, thus spreading germs to large numbers of people.</p>
<p>^^ okay - you are so right!!!</p>
<p>Do we really have to have awards?</p>
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<p>Some recognition for high achievement is fine with me, but when the val award is based on teeny tiny differences in accomplishment among students, then it really isn’t anything special or particularly amazing.</p>
<p>In many school systems, only those people who deliberately choose to compete for the valedictorian’s spot (by loading their schedules with the maximum number of weighted courses) have any chance of attaining it.</p>
<p>The students who do this often have to make sacrifices. For example, if you spend four years in the orchestra, you have no hope of being valedictorian because orchestra is not a weighted course. Your A in orchestra counts the same as a B in a weighted course, and people with four Bs in weighted courses do not end up first in their classes. So top students who also enjoy playing an orchestra instrument have to make a choice – compete for the top spot or stay in the orchestra.</p>
<p>This can be a difficult decision. Fortunately, it only seems to relate to the competition for the valedictorian title. As long as you have five rigorous academic courses every year, colleges don’t seem to care what your sixth and seventh courses are. The students who choose to stay in orchestra (or band, choir, drama, or journalism) do not seem to suffer in terms of college admissions.</p>
<p>@Alh, not sure how helpful it is to have NMSF info made public, but it is public and often the names are printed in local newspapers.</p>
<p>We experienced this with our son last year. The two girls tied for Valedictorian had all A’s. He had an A- in keyboarding one semester of his freshman year. They took only Honors classes; he took a full IB and AP load. Since Honors, AP and IB are all weighted the same, he graduated third.</p>
<p>We had known since freshman year that he had a “blip” but the girls did not. They thought they were tied with him and lived in fear of getting an A- until April of senior year when they found out. Our son got a sort of sadistic glee out of knowing they had sweated it for all that time.</p>
<p>We didn’t complain about the unfairness of ranking. We let his accomplishments speak for themselves. At the Honors Assembly, he pretty much swept all the awards. He was the only NM scholar in the class. I can guarantee you at graduation everyone knew that he was the brightest student in the class.</p>
<p>Let it go.</p>
<p>Be proud of your kid. If he doesn’t make val, he’ll be happy not to stress about making a speech next spring. Even if it seems unfair, be the grownup and teach your kid that the difference between val and sal doesn’t matter in the long run. NMF could be a more valuable honor for your kid. At any competitive school there are so many accomplished students–parents are proud of all of them, even if they’re not in the top 10%. There are also those with learning disabilities that are struggling to graduate with minimum requirements and minimum GPA.
In our district a student cannot make val on his own. It takes serious parental strategy/calculations going back to middle school. We have 7th graders going to high school to take honors geometry. We have parents pushing for “special permission” for their 9th graders to take AP classes, etc. At the end of freshman year, a student with straight A’s and what, according to the course catalog, would be the maximum number of 9th grade honors classes cannot possibly be ranked first–val has already been decided in middle school. I feel sorry for these kids because their parents choose their schedules for them. Too bad if they wanted to take an art/cooking/engineering/business or any other unweighted class. Parents who push their kids for rank tend to be a certain “type” and their kids are more often pitied than admired.<br>
A couple months ago I heard a radio story about the “curse” of being voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in high school. Years later, these students felt ashamed of their ordinary or unsuccessful lives. Could val be a similar “curse” for some? Parents, do you remember the name of your class val? I do. I also noticed that her lack of apparent success was a topic of conversation at class reunions over the years! What about the sal? Can’t remember his name.
How would you like this tie breaker? Two girls had the same GPA, so they looked at attendance–one had perfect attendance, the other had missed one day. (This is how my m-i-l became her class val back in the 50s.) Many schools have done away with attendance awards because they don’t want sick kids coming to school.</p>
<p>*in a lot of schools everybody knows everything about other kids’ grades. To suggest that the OP was “prying” may be very unfair. *</p>
<p>this is very true. At my kids’ school, they introduce the students with the 5 best GPAs at graduation. At older son’s graduation, when they named the Top 5, and one deserving student’s name was left off, the audience literally turned around and looked at the principal and faculty because of the obvious “goof” (and everyone knew which one of the 5 should not have been named).</p>
<p>The principal sent a letter of apology the following week (obviously, didn’t mention the name of the child who shouldn’t have been named). It was a stupid mistake. The weird thing was that the AP English teacher noticed the mistake when the names were earlier mentioned at a faculty meeting, but the GC was “adamant” that the list she created was right. (the problem occurred because the “left off” student’s transcript was missing a dual enrollment grade)</p>
<p>Anyway…the point is that at many schools, especially smaller private schools, everyone knows who the top students are because of various awards, number of APs, who’s gotten the “All As” awards in the past, etc.</p>
<p>And, again, I don’t know what the harm is in having 2 Vals…I don’t like the fact that the school has decided an arbitrary way to decide.</p>
<p>Neither my older daughters private prep school or my younger daughters comprehensive inner city public school weighted grades.</p>
<p>At the public school- one year they had 44 valedictorians! Not everyone wanted to give a speech & it is true that some students had taken as many APs as possible while others were on a vocational track, but I think it is great that they were all recognized.</p>
<p>@Mom2collegekids, your story reminds me of my brother’s HS graduation almost 40 years ago. He was somehow not recognized for being top student in 2 or 3 subject areas and almost every student turned and looked at him when the omission became obvious. I still remember the shocked expression on his face. They sent the pins in the mail. I don’t even think there was a note. I see nothing wrong with recognizing merit. Heaven knows athleticism is recognized. Why not merit as well? Just try to handle it with grace if it doesn’t work out as we imagine it should.</p>
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<p>The problem is many awards, for example for academic subjects, aren’t recognizing just merit, they are designating someone as the “best”. There may be several students nearly equal in ability and talent, but often teachers or whoever have to select just one person to receive recognition. They may have just a slightly higher grade, or the criteria might be highly subjective. In any case, it encourages a competitive mindset and leads many kids to “keep their eyes on the prize” rather than on the learning. Maybe if there were no limits for recognizing the high achievers, it wouldn’t be so stress inducing. The same applies to sports awards.</p>
<p>My D was sal at her school. There was a 0.01 difference in gpa between her and val. She spent most of high school as top student and went into senior year knowing that taking two unweighted arts classes could push her out of that position. She took them anyway and enjoyed them more than she ever would have enjoyed the val designation.</p>
<p>And while she received lots of allocolades for her high school accomplishments, she was only on top of her small world for a short time. Within a week of graduation she was working a summer job with the local sewer department… where she literally had to locate old manholes, pop the covers, and fill out inspection reports regarding their conditions. (And she told me, yes, sometimes she could see the solids flowing through.)
:-)</p>
<p>I’m surprised that so many schools mentioned here have students with almost identical GPAs, or several with the same GPA. Is the narrow difference between GPAs a result of grade inflation? My son’s school uses a 100 point scale, but a 90 is considered a pretty good grade in some courses. Typically, English teachers will give one or two 90 to 92s. Honors and APs are weighted five points. This system seems to make it more difficult to end up with two students with the same GPA. My son will be the val of this year, but his unweighted GPA is only about 93, and I’m not sure but the GC alluded that the second highest is below a 90. It’s unfortunate that the schools mentioned here have split hairs every year to determine rank.</p>
<p>My son was ranked first in both the junior and senior class his final year, but was not eligible to be the valedictorian because he graduated high school in 3 years. Yet his transcript showed that he was ranked #1 and that’s what the colleges looked at. He merely missed his chance at giving a speech – and didn’t mind a bit!</p>