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<p>Agree with this, historymom!</p>
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<p>“According to D” may not be the full story. You don’t know what the girl’s true medical problems are. Perhaps she has something more serious but doesn’t want to share it with the rest of the class (which is, of course, her right). I sure as heck wouldn’t be encouraging my children to spread any word of any medical conditions they had other than on a strictly need-to-know basis. Anyway, I think you’re right, not to sweat stuff like this. You can only control yourself in this world, and there is so much more inner peace in realizing that, than in getting upset over what others do.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why kids tell the latecomers what’s on the test. I sure wouldn’t!</p>
<p>^Exactly, mathmom. This is cheating and BOTH parties, the person who tells and the person who receives the info, are cheating.</p>
<p>FindAPlace–don’t worry, any college worth looking at will prefer a student with higher math courses to a Val with lesser courses. Vals & Sals are a dime a dozen, actually. ;)</p>
<p>As far as AP Independent study–it could be self-study for an AP test the HS doesn’t offer.</p>
<p>My S took another year of Latin through Independent Study after he had taken both APs by his senior year. It wasn’t an AP, but the HS did weight the grade because it was obviously material at the AP level.</p>
<p>And as far a latecomers who take a test the next day–teachers generally allow for this by changing the test significantly! At least at our school they do.</p>
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<p>I hear they’re so common that every school has them!</p>
<p>Everything is so subjective. Some schools are simply known, they send couple of top kids out of class of 30-50 to top schools on a yearly basis. Some of these schools do not even bother to name Valedictorians, Sals, rank or even let any info on who is top student. And for some kids taking any high math is much easier than History class. College admission professionals will still know every kid’s stand based on school profile and kid’s GPA and rigor of his/her classes, no matter how anybody calls all these games, the true picture will emerge.</p>
<p>It seems as if every so often there is a thread with this theme. On the other hand, there are a lot of kids in the top of the class who don’t “game the system” and do take the harder classes and then simply do well. I know for a fact that there were some eyebrows raised at graduation when my D and a few others were announced as being in the top ten. These were the students who did not talk about grades all of the time, were more social and were involved in activities such as dance team (D) or sports rather than the “typical” smart kid activities such as debate or academic team. I can’t say I know what classes these top ten took (it’s a fairly large school) but the GPA’s they achieved would literally not be possible even with straight A+'s unless the student was taking several AP classes. So that while this kind of cheating the system may happen in some schools, it isn’t universal.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, LOL.</p>
<p>I think the more “enlightened” schools do away with Val and Sal. The determination is a source of discontent and gaming (as this thread shows). Since it doesn’t mean the same thing at every school and is hardly a good indicator of the “smartest” people in the class, I think they are monikers that have outlived their usefulness.</p>
<p>I haven’t read through this entire thread. But I know from a lot of college visits that a lot of schools calculate their own internal gpa. I believe S1’s school threw out all weighting and nonacademic classes and calculated an applicant’s gpa on a 4 point scale (with pluses and minuses) for core classes only, and then calculated a separate score for the rigor of the curriculum a student had chosen.</p>
<p>So stacking a schedule with BS courses wouldn’t fly real well.</p>
<p>Hate to burst your bubble but many kids do some interesting things in independent study…and many are quite bright.</p>
<p>Vossrol, sorry, but only using GPA/test scores/rank for 20% of an admissions decision is highly unusual. I have never heard of another college that does that, but I hear Reed is kind of a unique place.</p>
<p>As for the test situation: I don’t “encourage my D to discuss other people’s medical conditions”. She told me this because that’s what the girl told her. I myself have suffered with migraines so I would never make light of someone with a legitimate migraine issue, they are awful. But it was very obvious to D and others in the class that this girl’s absences ALWAYS coincided with test dates, because sometimes she would leave early or come in late in order to miss that class (our schedule rotates so that classes are not held at the same time every day) and they would see her at other times during that day, smiling and seeming perfectly fine. And this teacher was not the kind to bother to re-do his tests. It was a physics class, so it wasn’t so much a matter of knowing what to study as much as knowing how to do the problems. I’m not sure taking the test a day or two later really even helped her out. But anyway, D and I agreed that it really had nothing to do with D and there was no point in stewing about it. D is nowhere near contending for Val or Sal (or probably even for making top 10%) so she really doesn’t care if this girl’s GPA is higher than hers or not. It just kind of bugged her that some people are so willing to game the system. </p>
<p>As for Independent Study, S had a friend that did independent study for his musical instrument. At the end of the year he gave a concert that was wonderful. I don’t know how that course was weighted in his GPA, if it was college prep or Honors.</p>
<p>^ Reed is the only one I’ve seen (clearly my ignorance) publish their admission formula. Which other LAC formulas are available?</p>
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<p>Or they have 20+ of them!</p>
<p>LOL - that’s an option - Valedictorian for all!</p>
<p>It is true that many colleges/universities will calculate the GPA, leaving out such subjects as PE/health, art (unless the kid is an art major), band/music (again, unless this is the chosen major), business law, shop, business management, typing, etc. Well, when that happens, one can see that a student’s GPA is built on some fluff. I knew one student who was counting on getting into a particular school – only to be rejected. Lots of fluff while his classmates took more rigorous classes and earned acceptance. </p>
<p>Many times, the kids who are taking the fluff are also padding their resumes with some interesting items. My favorite line to tell students is that it is nice you are in NHS, but guess what? So are thousands of others. It’s what you do while in NHS that makes the difference.</p>
<p>FallGirl,
Exactly. No surprizes at our school though. Kids do not talk about grades and still know because of the size of school - 160 total in HS, 33 in D’s graduating class. But nobody knows exactly who is top until graduation, when it is annonced who is one person - top overall GPA and who is top GPA for senior year. School sends calss profile and kid’s transcript to colleges and nothing else. College determines kid’s rank based on this 2 peices of information. There are no easy classes in school and very few AP are offerred. Again means very little, since D (college junior) mentioned that her HONORS Chem and Physics prep her for college much better than others’ AP classes.</p>
<p>Our HS has one Val. The number of Sals varies from year to year. Anyone with a weighted academic GPA over 4.0 is a Sal. I noticed in the grad program the Sals were not listed in alphabetical order and confirmed later (although it was not so designated) that the order of appearance was based on the GPA. </p>
<p>This last year, I think we had about 20 Sals, from a class around 500.</p>
<p>Val is attending Brandeis. First place Sal is attending JHU. Other Sal colleges being attended include Yale, Penn, Columbia, USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Wake Forest, etc.</p>