I’m so sorry! Very thankful that our high school does an indoor venue. You can count on rain and cold for Seattle in June.
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We were very happy to have a cool day on Friday (low 60s and cloudy at the start, around 70 and moderately sunny at the end). The football stadium at our high school is a real sun trap and in 2018 it was 90 degrees and we all got completely sunburned during the 90 minute ceremony.
Found out at the ceremony that the Principal decided to make the two kids co-valedictorians: he felt that rounding to the third decimal point was unfair. They had the same GPA over their entire coursework as well as in their AP courses. The 0.001 difference came from a class in tenth grade…my son took the non honors version because that’s what fit his math schedule.
Again, while it was not a huge thing for us, it was a nice surprise on the day of graduation.
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Yeah, my D17 came short of graduating summa cum laude by 0.003 quality points, and I’m like yeah, I’m all for standards (what with being a professor myself and all), but really?? At some point rounding errors are rounding errors, and the desire to rank everything gets into hair-splitting.
{/also subtweets USNWR’s methodology, among many other things👀}
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That’s a bummer! Sorry that happened. Sometimes little people with a lot of power take things too far. They lose sight. And I’m with you on rules- but this seems extreme. You have a smart kiddo regardless of their rounding!!!
I agree with rounding out to the thousandths place seems a bit like overkill. Also curious, did the school make it clear they always round out 3 decimal places or was that a last minute gotcha? Either way, I disagree with the policy just wondering how upfront/transparent they were about it.
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I mean, in reality the difference between magna and summa is a shrug.
Nobody’s going to care about the fine details between different grades of Latin honors, even if she applies to grad school in the future.
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I have more than once encountered people who were unshakably convinced that magna was the top Latin honor, over summa. Most people don’t know what any of them are and among those who have heard of them, most have no idea of the differences.
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What about the prestigious Yadda Yadda Cum Laude?
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Might be different at their daughter’s college, but in my daughter’s case, the requirements were 3.97 or better AND top 5% of class.
In that case, a GPA of 3.96-something, or being the 31st-best student, would objectively miss the cut-off. So not necessarily some mean person sitting in the office actively “rounding” to the n-th decimal - but simply an arithmetic “greater-equal” comparison when the back-end systems spit out the candidate list.
(Even if you instead were to make the limit 3.969, then someone with 3.968 would rightfully object of having been cut - and in response, each day you’d move the target a little further down?)
I have a bit of a complaint here. D23’s HS gave out an award to seniors at graduation for having a cumulative GPA of 4.0 or higher each semester. At least that is how it was listed. My better half works at the school and inquired why D23 wasn’t on the list. Well come to find out it was unweighted GPA. D23 took 11 APs and did not always make an A. She passed 7 AP tests so far and waiting on the final 4 now. Her GPA was always 4.0 or higher. At least half the kids on the list took 1-2 APs for the entire 4 years. D23 probably has an higher GPA than most of those kids. I wouldn’t be upset if they had said unweighted in the program.
I feel like giving the school a piece of my mind, but since my wife works there and we are officially done with K-12 I probably won’t.
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My son took 12 APs and graduated with a 3.97 GPA, he was not a valedictorian nor in the top 10% of his class because there were a lot of students that didn’t take APs at all or took 4 years of PE. What’s important is the quality education your student received and what he will do with it. These things always have a way of working out.
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D23 could care less. She never has been one for awards.
I just don’t like them leaving out details on the award in the program.
We will survive. Plus we know how to play the long game on these types of things.
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Valedictorian was on unweighted gpa? That’s weird. Ours uses weighted, so it accounts for honors and AP classes. It does not account for a student taking AP music theory instead of AP physics, but that I can live with.
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I didnt even report my sons 20k yr scholarship.
Would have bothered me too, and seems to miss intent:
If they are supposedly trying to celebrate exceptional academic achievement then what’s the point of not taking the relative difficulty of regular/honors/AP classes into account, given that they have already formalized that in their weighting scheme.
If they wanted to be a little more “inclusive”, it would have been better if they based it on the Weighted GPA, but then ALSO included kids where the U/W GPA was 4.0. This way, kids who did work succeed in their level of classes based on their ability were also being recognized, as they should.
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Yeah, same. Our school doesn’t technically weight GPA (you can only get a 4.0 on your transcript), but they DO weight it for calculating Cum Laude and Valedictorian.
Honestly, for a bench science-oriented kid, AP music theory might be harder than AP physics, and both of those far easier than AP English literature. (Of course, for a writing-obsessed kid or a born musician, that ranking would likely be different.)
Trying to decide what counts as a harder or easier schedule is a fool’s game, because the important variables are at the level of the student, not the classes.
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Well, the kids know which classes are easier and harder. They all take AP Lit senior year, but the seniors can choose between AP calc BC, AP calc AB, or AP Stats, and then AP Physics, AP Environmental Science, AP Comp Sci, or AP Music Theory.
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@JBSeattle you’re short a Yadda
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