What was your experience? Did your class’s Val/Sal had better college acceptances than other top kids in your class or lower?
My impression is that in strong high schools sometimes those in the top 10% but not number 1 or 2 are the better scholars and more interesting candidates. Why? Because #1 and #2 are often grade grubbers who selected courses on the basis of which would yield the most weight for the purposes of being #1. They are risk averse and often have little intellectual curiosity or interests. Their interest is in besting their peers rather than in mastering content. This is true only for those schools that base Valedictorian status on GPA rather than on faculty vote about which student is the best scholar.
Most Val/Sal from our district end up in top 25 colleges. Same goes for other top 10 kids. If any of the top 10 kid is going to a state school, it’s usually for BS/MD, free ride or family reasons.
D2’s Val is at Pomona. She is at Mudd (also had UChicago & Swarthmore acceptances). Her school does not rank, but she probably would not have been top 10%. Neither was hooked. So I’d say their results were comparable.
- I meant top 10 rank, not top 10%.
Understand there’s a whole app to fill out, this isn’t just about being king of the mountain at one hs, by its standards and grading scheme. And many elites are saying 50% of hs (and growing) don’t report rank.
I’m not against ranking in percentage but nominating Val/Sal is a disservice, it takes focus away from learning.
The top 10%-20% tend to go to schools of the same caliber of those that the val and sal attend. This year, our val is going to Yale, our sal is going to Princeton, and students in the top 10 are going to Georgetown, UChicago, Pomona, William & Mary, Olin College of Engineering, and BU. There is someone with a 3.6, which is in the 30%, who is going to Cornell and another going to GWU, while many of the top 10 %ers are going to Rutgers, Montclair State, UPitt, and Saint Joe’s University.
In our district sometimes good URM students and athletes in top 10% get into better schools then top 1%.
That’s quite a generalization that lostaccount has made!
Our grade grubbing non scholarly Valedictorian daughter is at Harvard, her grade grubbing Sal classmate is also at Harvard. Third ranked classmate is at MIT, fourth ranked at Boston College, fifth ranked at Columbia. Only one classmate out of the ten top ranked students is at a college that is a top 25 college, he was an athletic recruit.
I sometimes think folks too easily accuse kids of just grade grubbing. It’s weird. In life, the spoils do go to those who work hard, work smart, take on the right challenges and get top results. Sure, luck plays a part. But that’s different than those who try to take the easier route, just aim for, say, GPA and rank, the appearance of success.
Fortunately or unfortunately, top adcoms are looking at this difference. Some vals and sals or “top ten” have it, not all.
DS’s Val is at Drake, Sal is at UW-Green Bay on an athletic scholarship. My son was #5 and is at UChicago. Everyone was hard-working–they just wanted different things.
“Grade grubbing” tends to happen at large competitive high schools. The caliber and quantity of top students is so high that a grade grubbing strategy must be employeed in order to beat the rest. This probably does not happen as much in more “normal” public high schools (mix of student abilities).
I hate ranking - OK with percent ranking, but hate the traditional form.
Val at our local high school is going to Harvard (first Harvard in years), others are a mix of top 50.
Many top students don’t like to take regular classes at our district as level of students there isn’t high and teachers keep a slow pace and don’t go in depth. It gets top students easy 100’s but becomes boring. AP and honors class go in depth and at a higher pace.
D1’s Val went to Princeton after being deferred then rejected by Harvard. Sal was accepted/attending Harvard SCEA. No. 3 was accepted/attending SCEA to Stanford. Lots of others from her class applied SCEA to Stanford and Princeton but all were rejected. D was ranked about No. 6 and was accepted ED to Pomona. Lots of other top students ended up at highly selective schools, including MIT, UPenn, Cornell, Duke, Rice, Carleton, Oberlin, West Point (2), Tufts (2), Emory, Georgia Tech, WashU. This was a competitive public high school. Also all of the top 8 students or so had perfect GPA’s with very rigorous schedules.
Regarding the “grade grubbing” issue: at our large public high school, I would say there is some manipulation and tiger parenting. The Val and Sal were both younger siblings of top students and the parents knew how to game the rankings since they knew that there would be a half dozen or more students with perfect GPA’s and most rigorous schedules, and that the difference would come down to hundredths of a grade point. The key to being Val/Sal was to minimize the number of classes that were regular as opposed to weighted honors classes, which meant coming in at an advanced level in foreign language, postponing PE until senior year (so it wouldn’t count in the ranking submitted to colleges in the Fall of senior year), and the parents demanding that their students be placed in honors level fine arts classes and science classes and excused from satisfying prerequisites.
@Corinthian perfect example of grade grubbing caused by high schools ranking students. There should be percentiles, and that’s it.
We must salute poor URM kids who become valedictorians without parental guidance as it’s certainly not possible in any competitive school to become Val/Sal without knowing GPA gaming.
@suzyQ7 and @WorryHurry411 I agree. What was most irritating to me was that the system punished the students who followed the rules and believed their GC’s when told “no exceptions” to the rules about skipping prerequisites. Turns out that every year certain parents demanded and got exceptions to the rules and that was an essential component of becoming Val/Sal.
I’ve to give it to our district that they don’t give any one a pass but as they don’t educate students or parents about these delicate differences, not many know about these things. GC’s are pretty much useless in big public schools.