<p>It looks like she only was in our district for 8th grade, then three years of HS. If kids are going to skip a grade, around here they typically skip 7th. But she wasn't here to get that advice. And it still wouldn't solve the "problem" of having taken all the AP classes offered, there was "nothing left to take" (that wouldn't lower her GPA.)</p>
<p>Blossom, as the mother of a very accomplished basketweaver, feet-first swimmer and YouTube poster, I have to agree - basket weaving is not as simple as it looks. I breezed through chemistry courses, but still can't do any of those things my kid has accomplished! And if it is IB Underwater Basketweaving, it should be double-weighted :D</p>
<p>Back in the day....our HS had tryouts for Val! Anyone could write a speech and give it before the selection committee. Winner gets announced and Voila! We have a Val! Hmmmmm.....Wonder if they still do that!!!???</p>
<p>I'm one for saying: follow the rules. And change the system at the beginning-not at the end when it's worked out against you!</p>
<p>At my school, there are numerous GPA battles. My class is so small, that once you drop ONE honors class (two are determined by 8th grade test, and then honors classes are picked based off your grades in that class; so if you are usually FORCED to not take an honors class), you are out of the top 10%, and lose the "most demanding curriculum". The weighting is so off, that even a 100 in a regular class will always be lower than basically any grade in honors. Due to this, interesting classes like Philosophy are being dropped for more "GPA" points</p>
<p>NorthMinnesota, they did it at my D's elementary school for their big "graduation" in 6th grade! D's speech was deemed not PC enough to be read outloud (it might have mentioned food fights or something like that). I wonder how the speaker will be selected among D's HS 10 Vals. :confused:</p>
<p>There are a lot of kids who play the GPA game, dropping things like band and choir(honestly, how can ANYONE drop band just for an extra tenth of a point???), taking some courses online or at the CC where they aren't figured into GPA. But well roundedness is also a good attribute. If you have to drop all the fun things to be anything but Valedictorian(big money), is it really worth it?
Coolweather, how about the "Most Likely to Succeed", "Friendliest", etc. And please note that MVPs compete against all their teammates. So, that doesn't hold, either...</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you have to drop all the fun things to be anything but Valedictorian(big money), is it really worth it?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>
[quote]
"Most Likely to Succeed", "Friendliest", etc
[/quote]
These titles are not cut-throat like vals.</p>
<p>LOL BB!!! Yeah...I love kids with a sense of humor! My D once wrote a short story about how I broke her toe...at the lake when my lounger collapsed...no secrets are safe in our house! ;)</p>
<p>Our local HS has tried to get away from the weighted grade insanity due to comparing honors/regular/AP classes. Instead they weight class rank. You must take two honors/AP classes all year, every year and each report card period you then get two transcripts...weighted and unweighted if you qualify. The regular class kids can have a 4.0 and be number one and send their transcript to a college and the Honors/AP kid can have a lower GPA but still be ranked higher. The Honors transcript is the one sent out to colleges. Seems to work!!</p>
<p>Or how about cheerleading? Should we abolish it? It is cut-throat competition! It seems the only kids who don't get rewarded are the smart kids. I have nothing but respect for the top kids in my class. They are the brightest, nicest, coolest kids and they all happen to work really, really hard to get to their top spaces. maybe if I worked harder on my classes and less on my music, I could break the top 5! They deserve to be recognized as tops in their class, just like all our athletic teams always name an MVP for the year for each of our teams.</p>
<p>yes, blossom, competitive basket weaving is an emerging sport. game is not the correct word. I will and often do travel far to sit in the bleachers at a BW event and observe Advanced Participants proving to the world that this phenomenon isn't simply a passing fad, so to speak. Schoolwork has its place, to be sure, but until a youth has woven straw into gold within the pressure of the arena, I hardly think we should just usher them out into the real world of college and expect them to blow glass, hurl pots or sculpt dumpster assemblages, do you?</p>
<p>NorthMinnesota - This is an improvement. I like it.</p>
<p>When I did it, not only could I not be honored, I couldn't get a diploma or attend a public state college. I did however get a year of advanced placement and a 1/2 scholarship at a good private school. There are always rules we don't agree with. This one was probably put in place after someone transferred in a few weeks before graduation and became val. As usual, the backlash causes as many problems as the original issue.</p>
<p>And now for my opinion............I think the Val is the person Graduating with the best GPA (insert your favorite formula here), period. No further explanation needed. What difference could it possible make whether you did it in 2 years or 3 or 4. You took the same classes and you excelled. Now for all the 'rules'....
1) no transfers (unless required by the military)
2) no expulsions (unless you are a teachers kid, in which case you cut a deal anyway)
3) no .......</p>
<p>How about this for an alternative - make it highest grade points. Take more classes, get better grades get more points. A 3 year student would never win because they haven't taken enough classes... but doing band or football would add extra points...</p>
<p>
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What difference could it possible make whether you did it in 2 years or 3 or 4. You took the same classes and you excelled.
[/quote]
It's unlikely that she had to take the unwieghted classes like other kids. If they had to take unweighted classes, their GPAs could never be as high as hers, regardless of how much they excelled.</p>
<p>Remember Blaire Horstein? The Jersey girl who obtained the right to have home tutoring and an exepmption from gym? Because of her dad's maneuvering, she was able to replace nonweighted gym with a weighted course. This earned her the highest GPA by a hundredth of a point or so. Even though she claimed she was physically unable to take part in gym, she had applied for & won some type of presidential award that had required hundreds of hours of intense physical activity. Her dad worked all the angles. Plenty of vals do. Around here, we rarely see schools doing them any more because of the unhealthy impact it can have on course slection & gamesmanship.</p>
<p>Back in the dark ages we had this same problem at my high school. One of my classmates decided to graduate a year early and it was discovered that he had the highest gpa of the graduating class. The school did not name him as valedictorian but he got a special mention in the program as having the highest gpa. Those of us in the two classes that were impacted by the situation felt that it was fair, especially given the fact that if he had graduated with his original class he only ranked 3rd. It made a big stink in the media, mostly driven by the parents of the boy. We all felt that it was kind of like competing in a race and that someone who steps in right before the finish line shouldn't be able to win. That was just our feeling. The district managed to avoid any future situations like this by changing the graduation requirements so that it would be impossible to graduate in 3 years in the future.</p>
<p>I just had to look up our school's policy to see how it compared. First, the Val and Sal have to be in our district for the last four consecutive semesters. Then, the final GPA, Rank in Class and Val/Sal is determined by the SEVENTH SEMESTER statistics. By this guideline, she would not have been eligible in our school as she never reached her seventh semester...she was only in HS for 5 semesters at the time.....very interesting...</p>
<p>Unless something important is at stake -- like a scholarship the student actually needs -- I think it's in poor taste to throw a tantrum about graduation honors, no matter how unfair the system might be. High school sucks in general. That's not news. It's moot now, and you can move on to more important things.</p>
<p>Vals in TX get a large amount of money. Worth throwing a tantrum about!</p>
<p>Our school district has the four year and seven semester rule for Val.
Here in California no money/special awards for Val.</p>
<p>In my law school class we had the opposite issue. The #1 and #2 ranked people at graduation were drop-backs from the previous class, who took an extra semester to finish, and who would not have been ranked as highly in their original class. Decent prize money was attached to those rankings, too. It was a little annoying, since there was active competition for slots among the top five or so people in my class, and they all got dropped down two places. But . . . boo-hoo-hoo. I don't know that it affected anyone's life, anyway. It may have helped one of the drop-backs get a teaching job he coveted a few years later, but he quit it suddenly aftera couple years. Since post-law-school jobs get lined up way in advance, I'm not certain anyone ever looks at graduation class rank.</p>
<p>(That pretty much applies to high school, too. I once had a conversation with my kids' principal. He was acknowledging a problem with calculating my daughter's class rank, but trying to explain how it would basically work itself out by graduation. I told him I didn't give a hoot about class rank at graduation; I cared about class rank at college application. He thought that was sacrilegious.)</p>