Should high schools have only one Valedictorian?

^ Does having more than one Val add to the silly entitlement mentality or is it a recognition that the selection mechanism is not perfect and can leading to gaming?

Could be both.

@elodyCOH I love that your school uses EC activities and SERVICE. That is so great. The real winner is doing it all. Of course, if my kids were in that school I’d fear some brown nosing kid would get the award over someone introverted.

At our school there is full IB and AP offered. If you don’t go the IB route you have 0% chance at Val or Sal. Out of the top 30 kids, 2 weren’t in IB. Maybe that would be a case for 2 Vals- one for IB and one for the rest of the school.

@Happytimes2001 From what my son says, usually everyone is pretty happy with the choice. Service and involvement at school are the big things. There are many who have near perfect grades, but only a few who do a lot for the school. The Val last year’s main activity was serving in the tutoring center, and some academic teams.

We sent our D to an independent high school where grades are unweighted, they give out no academic awards, and students are not ranked. This does not mean there was no excellence; in general, this is an extremely high performing student body across multiple disciplines. Perhaps just a different idea of what “winning” means for a student.

I personally applaud schools moving towards this viewpoint. Our children are inheriting a world that is changing at an incredible speed, and they also will be handed a myriad of problems to solve, some of them horrendous. I myself hope that the best minds of the generation could be working towards the educational goals and the values of adaptation, collaboration and community problem solving rather than competition and hyper focus on tiny percentage points of GPA.

@Jensmom27 Yes, we attended an open house at a school like that. There were no awards, no weighted grades and no ranks. Actually, it’s a highly competitive school to get into. Definitely was not for my kiddo or our family. Kiddo rolled eyes and looked at me even though we were in the front row. Having spent many years in a school with an odd grading/gradeless system and the mentality that everyone was doing ok and no competition-we were ready for a change. Agree that minute differences in grading aren’t the important thing to focus on. But for kids who like to work hard and see the results, it’s great to have a system with grades. Many of the boarding and private schools have no rankings but they do tell the colleges what quartile the kids are in and some even have awards given at the end of year.

I don’t think solving big problems is related at all to grades. My own kiddos do several things in the community and one in particular is about solving very big problems for those who have real needs. That said, they still like to see the reflection of their hard work when they receive feedback both in school, work and sports. Some kids don’t care at all about grades and they are big thinkers and others need feedback to keep them interested. Not having grades for us meant that there was no feedback loop. It was really frustrating. If everyone is the same, how do they know if they are really good at something?

Your kids are getting grades so it’s a bit different. But the biggest thinkers and problem solvers are often the hardest workers and that can often ( though not always) translate into grades and awards ( and big things!!) The awards kids win that are based on effort can often translate into confidence. A kid who tries and fails several times then wins an actual award he/she cares about learns a great lesson.

There are many scenarios where academic competition and awards can be positive and healthy, for sure. There are also multiple situations and school systems in which the academic “competitors" are increasingly motivated by external pressure and internal anxiety, which means the children can ultimately end up losing out in some profound ways, even when they are the winners. The documentary ‘Race To Nowhere’ is worth a watch.

Research is also showing that stress hormones such as cortisol being frequently pumped through brains and bodies, especially ones that are still forming, can impart permanent damage, both neurological as well as physical. This alone is a good reason for educators and parents to put thought, conversation and then policies in place to make sure these competitions are indeed positive and balanced for the kids engaged in them, and that they aren’t spending their school years getting way too little sleep while simultaneously experiencing chronically elevated stress levels.

One Val. One Sal. Otherwise just do away with it. Our HS does not have a Val or Sal which, for our district given the horrible nature/behavior of some of the parents, is the right thing.

My kids are not conventionally schooled so I’m sure I think about this differently than most. I really don’t understand the level of buy in about this. If a school has a valedictorian, does that really mean the “top” student has a quality that the number 2, 3 or 10 doesn’t have? Does it make this student better or smarter or more prepared for higher education or life? I seriously doubt it.

Why does every day of a student’s high school career need to be embroiled in a competition. Let each student’s data speak for itself. Let each student have their own educational journey. There are plenty of ways for students to CHOOSE to compete academically. Spelling bees, science fairs, writing competition, robotics teams, math competitions, etc etc etc. Kids with highest standardized test scores are often recognized. Why does the whole 4 year high school experience need to be an overarching contest? How about learning for the joy and sake of learning rather than playing games with whatever “points” a school chose to prioritize to knock follow students down a peg or two? Maybe students would feel empowered to divert from the standard sequences and dig deeper into areas of real passion.

Note that colleges almost never are attempting picking a valedictorian. I’d rather see high schools graduate students with honors if they need a designation more like college.

I am not one to subscribe to the idea of everyone is a winner by any stretch. Awards are totally fine. When people sign on compete and there is clear, meaningful criteria to win. The Race to Nowhere is an excellent watch. No one care who was a high school valedictorian when college starts. My high school valedictorian from the dark ages took a very basic sequence of classes carefully chosen to get the highest GPA. She was pregnant before we all left for college the fall of senior year. I graduated #10 of 310 with the most rigorous courses I could take in my high school. I graduated college with honors. Our valedictorian never went on to college.

@MusakParent Totally with you regarding learning and competing in what you are interested in.
I live in a town however where the folks who love the idea of not competing made that mandatory for all the rest. No grades. No accolades, nothing. Wasn’t an opt in/opt out thing. So I have gone that route. They LOVED the movie Race to Nowhere. Though I personally wouldn’t spend money on that kind of thinking I was told that the message is essentially about kids where the parents/society pushed too much and some ended up committing suicide. Hmmm. Ok,

That may/may not be the premise of the documentary. If it is, I think people need to factor in the causes of mental illness ( family, genetics, etc). They also need to factor in the positives of competing and learning to fail. We have seen many families in our town where the parents won’t let the kids compete (participation trophies for all, diminish kids/parents who compete). These are often the families with some of the issues (suicidal and emotional, depression).They hover around their kids asking questions and the kids can’t breathe. Very few kids who are competing especially if they are doing things they like and competitive sports seem to have this issue. They learn to lose.

In our family the focus is always on doing your best and on grit. Did you throw you hat in the ring? Did you go outside your comfort zone? Why, or why not. Though we don’t have mental illness in the family, I think making our kids get out there is important.

I went to the State Cross Country state championships this morning. The kids ran wildly across packed ice, into the muddy woods and back across a muddy field, about 150 strong . When I picked up my kiddo from the bus we laughed a lot. Craziest race ever. Where do you get that experience if you don’t compete. Yep, all the scores were about 2 minutes behind. But I can pretty much guarantee they’ll all remember it.

let me answer your first question, in post 129, giving my opinion.
No, being Val doesn’t mean better prepared for life, it doesn’t exactly address smarter, or faster, or cuter, or height or weight, or nicer personality. For most people and by definitions I have read, Val is the best high school grades. No more, no less. So I would feel the title is not intended to mean anything else.

Perhaps high schools and colleges which encourage hyper-competition for valedictorian or class rank may be (possibly unintentionally) showing students what real life later may be like, given the trend of economic growth going increasingly toward the elite, basically trending the economy more toward “elite or bust”.

But real life competition, while sometimes cutthroat, often does not have the clear cut rules that everyone can see like how a high school may calculate GPA to determine who is valedictorian. It is, of course, highly competitive to compete for a spot among the elite, but it is not clear from the outside how it is determined who makes it, and some people may have substantial unearned or inherited advantages over others.

As a parent of a valedictorian and a salutatorian, where there was only one of each chosen, it meant a lot to my pups to compete for and win this honor. Since it meant an automatic full tuition scholarship to Flagship State, it was very important for our finances. Even though they ended up getting a better financial deal at the elites, the knowledge that they would be able to attend college affordably, meant a lot to all of us.

Our school doesn’t rank but does have Latin honors. Summa cum laude is top 3%. I think it makes more sense but S19 is still somewhat worried that he won’t get it because some other kids who didn’t take PE will have higher GPA. Separately they have a special award for around 15 best seniors (out of 500+, counting not only grades but service, leadership etc.) which is a bigger deal.

My nephew’s school announced val and sal at graduation more as a quick afterthought. Instead they had a special award to went to the #1 boy and the #1 girl so if girls were top 1-8 and a boy was #9 it went to Girl #1 and Boy #9. The students getting it knew at least a few days before graduation. They did not give a speech but each one asked an adult member of the school to present him/her. One picked the librarian since he had been talking to the librarian for 4 years. In part because she was shocked to be asked and in part because she wanted to do a great job she did a wonderful job talking about the student. The other speaker was an Italian teacher. She mostly spoke in Italian to the student’s family who came from Italy for graduation. I’m sure the speech was great but I didn’t really understand it.

My vote is for one valedictorian, but the school should have tie-breakers in place such as SAT/ACT/PSAT scores.

I prefer one valedictorian, or two if there is a tie. I think it’s nice to recognize them. But it really isn’t an issue at our little rural school, so I might feel differently if we were elsewhere. DD’19 took one AP, got an A and is the only one in her class to have over a 4.0 (lol barely) so the competition isn’t cutthroat. The other girl taking APs says she’s getting C’s so I think DD will get val. She did take the AP mainly to have the opportunity to get a GPA boost and help her ranking but other than that she has taken whatever classes she wanted.

According to my brother at Thanksgiving dinner, my niece’s school in Arlington, VA put in a rule under which anyone with a weighted GPA of 4.0 or above was valedictorian. Last spring there were 120 valedictorians, LOL.

If everyone is special, then nobody is