<p>
[quote]
But as the path to that honor has intensified over recent years, some administrators are beginning to question the valedictorian tradition. Several factors including the increase in the number of high school students, grade inflation, intense competition for college acceptances and a savvier student body have changed the game.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>At my high school there's a 4.0 cap...so there end up being 5-6 valedictorians, which really doesn't bother anyone. Over here, it's not really that much of a distinction.</p>
<p>Our school declares a sal and a val every year, plus a "top ten"--the latter apparently a regional tradition. But it's based on unweighted grades. Although the two honorees this year were certainly worthy, there have been years when the val had never taken a single honors course. And half of the top ten are students who don't take challenging classes. Most of the Ivy acceptees in my S's class are not in the "top ten." It makes it fairly meaningless to many.</p>
<p>The system is crazy. I'm sure everyone in top ten of D's class had all A's, the order came down to how many unweighted classes the students took. Those who wanted to be first took study hall instead of a non-weighted elective. My D took some fun classes like theater, cooking, etc, which brought her rank down, but she was OK with that. About one-fifth of the class had GPA's of 4.0 or above!</p>
<p>I am happy my childrens' high school does not rank. And kids from this school get into nearly every Ivy every year.</p>
<p>Our high school does weight AP or pre-AP classes. Some of our students were stunned to learn that a 4.0 class would reduce your GPA if your GPA was above a 4.0 overall. Others knew that, and they schedule themselves accordingly. The past four years, we've had some battles for that top spot. Twice, it has come down to a final examination or project in a particular class. Of course, the teachers do not know that when they start their grading for that final exam/project. So they, too, will be surprised who earns the top spot. From what I understand, the class of '09 should be interesting with as many as seven people holding 4.0 GPAs or better.</p>
<p>I've noticed that there is definitely an advantage to being known as one of the "straight A" students. Even the teacher who cheerfully screws most of the top kids in the class doesn't want to be the one to break the "perfect" record.</p>
<p>Alright, I have to swim against the stream. I do not think that ranking is necessarily wrong, and I think it is helpful in some situations. Coming from a large (3600 students) public high school that was good but did not send very many to prestige schools, especially outside of the midwest, I was grateful to have a (weighted) rank that quickly and easily put my grades into perspective for admission counselors who had encountered very few, if any, applicants from my school. Having class rank did not cause endless in-fighting among students, nor did it cause students to do ridiculous things to game the system. In my year, we ended up with 2 valedictorians and 3 sals, and because rank is weighted, these were the students who had done the best in the hardest classes . </p>
<p>Now, I do think it is important not to overvalue rank--there's a lot more to being an all-around good student than earning an A in every class, I'd say--but I do think that, when done well, class rank can be helpful for students coming from large, not ultra-competitive, public high schools such as mine. I understand why small and/or very competitive schools would not want to rank, but I do not believe that it is always wrong to.</p>
<p>Edit: And the teachers at my high school couldn't have cared less, in general, about giving a formerly straight A student a lower grade if that's what they thought was warranted. That's not to say that they vindictively tried to go after those kids, but (if they even knew about it), giving a straight A student a lower grade was not a concern of theirs.</p>
<p>^^Your post just supports the non-ranking philosophy. IMO, you can have five vals and sals. If 5, why not 6 or ten or twenty?</p>
<p>^^I don't see how. 5 students out of the 770 who graduated is pretty minimal, and isn't that much more than the traditional one val/one sal (my father did think that since there were 2 vals, there should be no sals, because when there is a tie technically the next person/people are ranked third). If my schools system of ranking, which is relatively complicated and thus unlikely to do so, produced 20 students with the highest and second highest GPA, then I wouldn't have a problem with it. But, like I said, it's pretty unlikely with the way my school calculates rank. </p>
<p>Besides, I'm not really so concerned with rank as a means of crowning a val and sal. I'm more concerned with rank as a means of giving admissions officers quick and clear perspective of how well a student has preformed in comparison to their class mates. If all my transcript says is that my weighted GPA is 4.42, and my guidance counselor does not offer any more information, how do you know if that's a really good GPA, a fine but not spectacular GPA, or a mediocre GPA for my school? Especially if this college gets very few applications from my high school? Now, if it says that I have a 4.42 weighted GPA, and that I'm ranked 14/770, and that I don't share that rank with anyone, they know immediately how well I've done compared to my classmates.</p>
<p>Edit: A clarification: The valedictorian of my high school is the student (or students) who obtains the highest weighted GPA. So in my year, two students obtained exactly the same GPA (they both got straight A's in the same amount of honors classes). The three sals obtained the exact same second-highest GPA.</p>
<p>So far our school which ranks on a 0-110 scale weighted has never produced a tie, even though there are 700+ kids in the graduating class. While you probably could game the system, I don't have the sense that people are dropping orchestra and other unweighted classes to get the top spot. I think it might help that no one knows their rank until it's announce, though I suppose you could quiz the likely suspects about their weighted GPAs which do appear on the report cards.</p>
<p>For each student and person will seek their own place in this world. Does a mentally handicap who gets a 4.0 any less of a valedictorian at his level; Do we not applaude his efforts? For the 60% amongst us, do we handicap those who get 4.0? For those who are in the top 20%, and only get 3.0, are they better than the lower tier?</p>
<p>If a straightforward solution existed for this dilemma, there probably wouldn't be an issue to discuss. A case can be made that anyone with all A's should be Val, simply because s/he received the highest available grade in all classes. And a case can be made that Val is a singular term. Whatever. How does one handle the case where a student in one school gets a B in AP Calc and 5 on the AP Calc test, and a student in another school gets an A in the class and a 2 on the test? Would anyone feel comfortable with a Val who'd taken 15 AP courses and gotten no better than 1 on any of the AP tests?</p>
<p>advantagious:</p>
<p>Your dad is correct. If you have an arithmetical tie for Val, by definition your HS has no second place. Again, why is 5 out of 770 ok, but not 7 or 10, or 20+? Where do you draw the line?</p>
<p>Admissions officers look at the school profile to put a 4.42 into context.</p>
<p>Well, first off I just want to point out that I did not make a judgment as to 5 being an acceptable number of vals/sals but 7 being too many, or 7 being acceptable and 15 being too many or anything of the sort. I initially said that I think there are situations in which ranking is not wrong or in need of abolishment, and I still think that. I also said in my follow up post in response to your question that if 20 students met my school's definition of valedictorian, I would not think that that was wrong (although I would find it exceptional, given the relative unlikelihood of that happening under my school's system, I do admit). I'm not going to answer the question "where do you draw the line", because I'm really just not that interested in bickering over what should and should not be a valedictorian or how many there should be or any of that. I view having a valedictorian as a side effect of maintaining class rank, and so I only really care about keeping the distinction around in that I would like to keep class rank around <em>in some cases</em>. Per my example, I was not my school's valedictorian and, I can assure you, was at no point in the running for that distinction (nor was I ever interested in the distinction). So I'm not speaking out of personal interest. </p>
<p>It depends on the school profile if an applicant who is only given a GPA can have that GPA put into context by the admissions officer. Mine does include a breakdown of what the top GPA is and what the 90th percentile GPA is, so my GPA could have mostly been put into context without the rank. I don't think this is true of all schools, though--I know that I read a book written by a former admissions officer at Harvard in which he pretty openly made the case for a more, instead of less, precise ranking system. He lamented that sometimes absolutely no context was given for grades, and also was less than thrilled with schools that gave ranking by deciles or quintiles, being that it could be difficult or impossible to tell whether a student was in the top few in their class, or barely hanging on to the top 10%. I fully admit the fact that this book is a few years old by this point (not 20 years or anything like that, but around 7, I believe. I realize that this is not an insignificant amount of years in the context of college admissions). Still, I don't think I'm out on a crazy person limb here. I recognize that there are situations in which using class rank is not ideal. But I just don't think that it is the devil incarnate.</p>
<p>At my school you need a 4.0 Weighted to be a Val. Granted that you only get 0.025 added to every semester of AP classes you take. This year's was a ~4.4 GPA by the 1st ranked. He took 12 AP's and only got 1 B in all his classes. </p>
<p>There were 35+ Val's this year, almost 40, but my school is large and this year happened to ULtra competetive.</p>
<p>I remember my high school had one of the most cutthroat competitions for Valedictorian that I'd ever seen. First, one guy got his mom (or maybe vice-versa) to drive him to advanced classes at the high school from middle school in order to get a leg up on everyone else. Another girl, when informed she got a B for a semester thanks to a semester exam, started crying and begged the teacher to raise it to an A, which he did. </p>
<p>But the actual co-valedictorians ended up pulling out all the stops and kept on raising the stakes; when one heard about that the other was taking summer classes, she had to also. When one heard that the other was taking 5 APs, she dropped one of her classes to take it too. I know an earlier class where someone who took orchestra instead of AP Music Theory ended up as salutatorian and was very disappointed. </p>
<p>I definitely preferred the added points for AP and honors classes, but it really annoyed me how our school didn't offer classes like AP Art History so I ended up having to take a standard "humanities" class that hurt my GPA for my "art/music" credit. Plus people who took languages who didn't offer AP classes at our school (like Japanese) were hurt more than those who took Latin, which offered two AP classes. It didn't matter anyways; everyone got into good colleges, but back in high school I wouldn't have been surprised if brawls had broken out. </p>
<p>What I really don't like is when colleges offer certain scholarships to "Valedictorians only" or when local papers publish all the pictures of valedictorians, not recognizing that a lot of people at some schools could be valedictorians at many others. If people de-emphasized the importance of being a val or sal, then there would be much less of this crazy competition for a high GPA and maybe- just maybe- more focus on learning.</p>
<p>This kind of competition flabbergasts me. My school is relatively small, with a graduating class of around 200. Maybe that's why no one cares...</p>
<p>I loved it when all the AP kids were so ticked at a kid who was not taking AP and ranked No. 2. This young man had no desire to take an AP class. Instead, he had to work nearly full-time to help out his family. The AP kids were so annoyed that this young man was in the battle for the valedictorian spot, because he "never challenged himself." They took the harder classes, but chose to goof off in them, too. They wanted the weight but didn't think they would have to work for it. The young man finished No. 4 in the class. Still, he got his first two years of college paid by a scholarship. BTW, he's a great kid, too.</p>
<p>"Given all the drama over the honor, how do valedictorians fare in the long term? Karen D. Arnold, an associate professor of higher education at Boston College, spent more than 15 years studying valedictorians who graduated in 1981 from high schools across Illinois. Dr. Arnold found that high school valedictorians consistently did well in college and were generally well-rounded, successful people. They were not a group, however, who were particularly creative or who would achieve great distinction in life."</p>
<p>I found this quote to be the most fascinating in the article. Folks on this board are constantly asking why top GPA / SAT kids are turned down by some schools. Perhaps admissions has figured out what the research says. Top schools take chances on kids without the top, top GPA because some of these "chance" kids end up being the most interesting in the long term.</p>