I found this to be interesting (from today’s news):
“A high school in Mason, Ohio, is eliminating the honor of valedictorian in an effort to improve mental health.”
@CardinalBobcat Probably a really good idea.
My kids go to the same high school I did and there has not been a valedictorian since before I graduated so at least 31 years.
D19’s high school doesn’t rank, with the reason that the school overall is high performing so rankings are misleading. I guess a side effect is that kids don’t waste time playing rankings games. Always decent representation in the T20. There are a lot of Top 20 admits this year and a good bunch more if you extend that to T30. Most of the ivies represented other than afaik Columbia, which hardly ever takes anyone from this school… all without an official ranking,
Elite schools, specially Ivies tend to admit more applicants from feeder private schools and magnet schools. Large suburban high schools are the ones where competition is highest yet acceptance rate is very low.
Your family’s race, education, geographical location and income level matter more in admission than minor rank differences.
My S19 is co-Val at his mid size (345 graduating) HS in VA. Co-Val is not common at his school as they weight and go out to the thousand place to determine Val. This year it is a tie between 2 students so they are not naming a Sal. He only applied to 2 “elites” (MIT and Princeton) but did not get accepted to either. He is an unhooked upper middle class white kid. He did get accepted to Ga Tech OOS, which some may consider “elite” for STEM. He did not play the GPA game. He was in Show Choir all 4 years even though his last 2 years the credits were not needed and it was “hurting” his GPA. He even got a B one semester in AP English 11. He did get accepted to the local regional Governor’s STEM school for all his math and science classes for 11th and 12th grade. All these classed were dual enrolled and weighted like AP so that definitely help his GPA but he never took any extra online APs just to boost his GPA.
His co-VAL is going to UVA (S19 was also accepted there) but I am not sure where else he applied. Last years Val did go to Harvard though.
One thing our school does is not rank the top 2%. If you are in that group, you get a #1 ranking. Apparently there are several schools at least in this region that do that. So there is some gamesmanship going on, but that takes it down a bit. They also cap the AP’s at 4/year. So most of the top kids end up within a class or so having the same # of weighted classes.
We have an exceptionally high number of 4.0 UW GPA students this year. From what I know, 3 are attending in-state public universities, 1 is going to an extremely selective UC, and 1 Ivy. I’ve heard of some lower-GPA students attending selective schools such as Georgetown or receiving great merit scholarships. I believe all 5 “vals” took a lot of AP classes and participated in very time-consuming ECs.