<p>Haha aarosurf... our val (or at least the person going to be val, no one can catch her) is EXACTLY like that. Asks questions ALL the time in multivariable calc, and she has a 99 or 98.9% or something sick like that. </p>
<p>Percentage points are dumb, I wish we had the good old 4.0</p>
<p>Hmmm...our val is pretty quiet. She does partcipate, but not as much as others. Somehow, she always makes 98%'s or higher in her classes.</p>
<p>CharterofFreedom:</p>
<p>I'd hate to be you.</p>
<p>Our school has roughly the same stats - about 350 kids per grade, and with limited resources and weighted classes to take. Difference is, I didn't even think about GPA until this year, and I'm rank one anyway. It's not that others aren't being competitive about it - plenty of overachievers in my school - just that in my opinion, it's morally dubious at best to take a class for a GPA boost. I'm taking seven weighted classes, five of them APs, but I do it because I LIKE the classes, not because "OMG RANK 1!!" and whatnot.</p>
<p>I'm not sure I could put up with that many classes I don't care for, LOL. Only one I dislike right now is the foreign language class, but that's compulsory.</p>
<p>Mine is purely on weighted GPA, with an A being a 5.0 in an AP, 4.5 honors, 4 on level. -1 per grade down from there. You have to take about 18-22 AP's depending on the year to be Val at my school with a max of one B, but even that's usually too much. Ties are rare. 600-750 per grade.</p>
<p>So basically, you have to give up sleeping and having fun. College's would prefer great grades and EC's to val. It's really not that exciting. If they just wanted lots of knowledgeable people, they'd just give you some big standardized test. The fact that you write essays, get recs, give EC's, etc...show that grades are a moderately small part of apps at the best schools. Just keep you form getting instantly rejected</p>
<p>PrescitedEntity:</p>
<p>Glad to hear you could attain val without thinking about courseload. It certainly wouldn't have worked for me. I would have probably taken a lot of the classes I did end up taking, but there are people in my school who did the exact same thing as I did (just not as well, heh).</p>
<p>You can't claim that I have morality faults because I realized how the system works and used it to my advantage. Successful people have been doing this for millenia. It wouldn't be any morally superior to just take classes that you 'liked'. What are you achieving? A happy, slacker high school career? See how far that takes you in the real world.</p>
<p>Jman2306 hits the nail on the head. High school just doesn't provide the opportunities to broaden your intellectual scope. You have to do it yourself, and suck up whatever high school throws at you.</p>
<p>LOL, you're probably right. I shouldn't be speaking of morality, anyhow; what do I know of such things?</p>
<p>I guess it's just little ol' me trying to justify my aversion to doing such a thing. As for broadening the intellectual scope, I dabble in things that are utterly trivial, so you know where I stand! :p</p>
<p>I guess I'm just a slacker (relative to people here). To tell you the truth, I admire people with the will and ambition to do what you do; if not for being inherently curious about most things in general, and being endowed with some innate ability to soak up stuff I'm taught, I wager I'd be a 'C' student in a general class, what with my horrible work ethic and study habits...</p>
<p>Yeah, I've already resigned to failing at life. :D</p>
<p>"it's morally dubious at best to take a class for a GPA boost"</p>
<p>sounds like you've climbed up the ladder to high GPA-dom and are now pulling it up with you saying "no one else try!"</p>
<p>(stephen colbert)</p>
<p>Might sound that way, but honestly, I didn't think about GPA at all.</p>
<p>In fact, I didn't even know I was rank one until Ms. Rank Two told me...</p>
<p>That made for a very awkward moment.</p>
<p>^lol. She's angry.</p>
<p>I'm only in 10th grade, so I don't know my ranking, but everyone including me knows who is going to graduate at the top (certainly not me!). I might ask my guidance couselor during my junior year. Right now I'm probably ranked #5 or 6 in my class.</p>
<p>To become valedictorian at my school you have to:
(1) take lots of spring/summer college courses, but only the ones that are given AP weighting. Meaning it's ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY that you take Nanotechnology and Inventive Problem Solving (which is a joke), but if you feel like taking Abstract Algebra or Number Theory you should hide it from your guidance counselors, otherwise it'll be Honors and bring down your weighted GPA.
(2) be in the hardest track in our school, which culminates in DiffEq and Matrix Theory senior year.
(3) know the Frobenius method, and solve Bessel equations near the speed of light. As you will know from three years of physics, this will cause your hands to feel very heavy, but you should be used to this by now from taking notes in your IB history classes.
(4) get all As in everything.</p>
<p>That being said, it is possible to evade the first requirement if you somehow get to take an AP class or two freshman year, which people usually aren't allowed to do. My friend took AP Art freshman year and was #2 for a while, but fell out of the running when she got a B in physics.</p>
<p>One of my teachers mentioned a particular year when none of the "smart people" had ever heard of the valedictorian because he/she was taking all the easy classes</p>
<p>The challenge the current one to a duel. XD</p>
<p>It's time to d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-duel!</p>
<p>You guys are lucky. At my school, taking Ib and AP classes DOES REQUIRE a lot of BRAIN POWER, not just 'hard work'. You actually have to be a skilled student or an EXTREMEMLETLEKTLEKJ FOCUSED PERSON which most people, especially teenagers, ESPECIALLY ME, are not.</p>
<p>I regret taking those hard courses. I really do. **** the system. My children are going to be UNSCHOOLED. look it up.</p>
<p>I don't know why some schools make it so complicated. </p>
<p>As long as a school ranks, shouldn't the valedictorian be whoever is ranked #1? Thats how it is at my school.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It's time to d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-duel!
[/quote]
Yugi-OHHHHHHHHHHH</p>
<p>anyway, you get to be valedictorian by sleeping and playing with shiny things.</p>
<p>I'm with PrescitedEntity on this one. I don't take the classes I take just so that I can get a high GPA. The fact is, I would get bored if I took all easy classes. Because of the way things work at my school, I was required to take a normal sophomore English class because I was taking AP world history. I slept nearly every class and still pulled an 'A', but I wasn't at all challenged. This year I have five AP classes. I'm not getting the highest 'A' in them, and they are challenging (especially AP Bio), but I don't regret it. If I end up being the valedictorian, then great, but if I don't, then that's fine too.</p>
<p>So if you as well as another person get a 5.0 GPA, does that make you both valedictorian, or whoever had higher percentages?</p>
<p>This thread is nearly six years old, ^ lol.</p>
<p>What’s a saledictorian?</p>
<p>@srilanka132435: It depends on the school. Some might designate them as co-valedictorians, some will calculate their grades more thoroughly to see who has the highest GPA by the decimal - sometimes to the hundredth or even thousandth point.</p>
<p>@foodlover001: Salutatorian is the person with the 2nd highest GPA, usually. S/he usually has the highest GPA in the class with the exception of the valedictorian.</p>