<p>Is valedictorian really a valuable thing? Is it worth to give up some regular but (at least sounds) important courses (webdesign, for example) to be a valedictorian? That's our dilemma here. D. is now ranked either 1st or 2nd in her class. Next year she will be a junior. Please give some comments.</p>
<p>IMO, as a parent, and as who I am, no. But, in some situations, it can mean money. In Vermont, I believe the vals of each school get a free ride or tuition or some generous award at the UVT. Very nice, and yes, I can see why the competition can be fierce for that. #2 gets no guarantees in this situation I believe. You can join Fastweb and do a search and see what there is available for vals and if any of those goodies are worth scraping and scrapping for. Also ask the GC outright what programs, grants awards the val gets. Look at the schools that you think your DD may be considering and see if there are any distinct advantages.</p>
<p>For my kids, there would have been an absolute zero advantage over being #2 or top 10% or even lower than that. Didn’t even bother to see where their line would be drawn because they weren’t going to even be close.</p>
<p>This is a rather cynical response, but can your D wait to take the classes until her senior year? If she can stay #1 or #2 through junior year, that will be her rank when she applies to colleges. If it falls a bit during senior year, it won’t matter in the admissions process (assuming it doesn’t tank terribly, which I sure it won’t.)</p>
<p>Some schools, Dartmouth for example, will announce (*i.e.*brag) each year how many valedictorians they accepted and/or enrolled. So I suppose it is of some value to the school if you can help boost their total. But when the admissions committee is sitting around the table making decisions between admitting a No. 1 student vs a No. 2 or 3 student, I’m guessing other factors would weigh much more heavily in the decision process.</p>
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Maybe. I confess that I did this when I was in high school–even getting an A in a non-honors class could have cost me the top spot. Because it was a class I didn’t care about much, I didn’t take it.</p>
<p>It’s a judgment call. Does it matter to your kid to be the val, and to make a speech at graduation? It mattered to me; others don’t care. I don’t think it will matter much at all for college admissions.</p>
<p>For my D it mattered to her what grades she received but not the ranking, and she only took the classes she wanted. Missypie’s advice is good about ordering the classes so it won’t matter to admissions. I have to wonder about how important it really is. Coureur is right that some schools brag about % of Vals/Sals, but admissions are made well before the final ranking determination is made.</p>
<p>I really don’t know the answer, but I know at the UC schools they compare you to the other applicants from your school, and on the Common Application the counselor has to check a box answering the question: "In comparison with other college prep students the applicants course selection is: most demanding, very demanding, demanding, average or below average</p>
<p>For the school report, GC checks off if a student’s Academic achievement was Average, Good, VG, Excellent (top 10%), Outstanding (top 5%), or One of the top few (top 1%). For the kind of schools D2 was applying to, her chance was better as a top 1%. As her class size was 180, she would need to be Val or Sal for her class. When she was a junior, she didn’t want to change her electives to maximize her GPA. I think her GPA was very close to the Val, but she got the second place. I don’t think she had any regrets, except when it came to making the speech. D2 gave her speech at the award ceremony/senior night, instead at the graduation. On the other hand, she got to take photography, fashion design and a literature class she enjoyed.</p>
<p>Last spring we attend my niece’s HS graduation (large public) in a distant state. There had been a contest to give “the speech”…interested students submitted their text and the best one was chosen by a committee. At the graduation ceremony, they announced the Val as if it was Miss America…“and your 2012 Val is…!” She stood up and waved and that was it. The Sal was not recognized at all. However, a big deal was made over the Class President and VP. So the degree of honor and ceremony varies from school to school.</p>
<p>There are many valedictorian scholarship dollars out there…so it IS a factor.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be worried about it at your early stage though…take the classes that will interest you the most.</p>
<p>Can she take web design (or other interested course) at your local cc over the summer so the grade is not averaged with her hs GPA? I’m not making a statement one way or the other about how important being valedictorian is. That’s a very personal thing.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, in 2012 Brown accepted 24% of the vals who applied, compared to 15% of sals, 13% of those in the top 10% of their HS class, and only 2% of those in the second decile or lower. They admitted 9% of applicants from HS that don’t rank.</p>
<p>[Admission</a> Facts | Undergraduate Admission](<a href=“Undergraduate Admission | Brown University”>Undergraduate Admission | Brown University)</p>
<p>Based on that admittedly tiny and possibly unrepresentative sample, I’d say being val probably does count for something at some highly selective colleges—though as someone pointed out upthread, they can’t actually know who is the val until the end of senior year, after the admissions cycle is completed. Still, it’s probably the case that being #1 in your class at the time you apply does count for something at Brown, and a lot of those #1s at the time of application end up being vals. On the other hand, it’s not exactly a golden ticket to admission, as evidenced by the fact that 3 out of every 4 vals who apply to Brown are rejected. Of course, there’s another way of construing the data: it could be that what vals have in common is that they’re academically motivated, academically capable, high-achieving types who, on average, just have stronger stats and stronger resumes than others, even sals and top 10%-ers. So it could be that vals are admitted to Brown at a higher rate than others because they tend to be the strongest candidates, not because Brown is specifically selecting for them. The only thing that makes me think Brown cares at least a little about who’s val is the fact that they would bother to publish this statistic.</p>
<p>So is it worth something? Yes, probably, at least at some highly selective schools. How much? Who knows. Is it worth manipulating your HS curriculum in pursuit of that honor? Well, that’s an individual decision, but my inclination would be to say no. First, you might not get the val designation, and that would call into question how much you gave up in pursuit of it. In fact, even if you do get it, I’d question how much you’re giving up in pursuit of it, and whether that trade-off is worth it. More generally, I think the best “strategy” is HS is to be who you are and do what you do well, and let the chips fall where they may. If you’re bright and talented and accomplished, you’ll get into a very fine college, hopefully one that’s a good fit for you; that’s the great thing about this country, we’ve got a lot of excellent colleges, and there’s one out there that’s right for you (probably more than one, actually). The rest is just chasing after prestige points, which to my mind is ultimately a pretty hollow and shallow game.</p>
<p>Sophomore year D gave up the chance to be Val (or so we thought) for a unique opportunity and I think making that decision was liberating - she took the classes she wanted to and in the end was named Val anyway. </p>
<p>It’s not unheard of for a junior ranked #1 to slip from that spot and miss the honor anyway. You have an opportunity to have a discussion about what it all means and just because your D might not end up #1 because of the arcane rules your school uses, doesn’t mean she shouldn’t or won’t continue to do her best work.</p>
<p>The Val honor was very nice, but honestly - it’s not a lasting thing. More important to explore and find out what your interests are. Think of it this way - you’ll save money by experimenting with courses now rather than at college where you will definitively be paying tuition (not sure if you are in a public or private school now.)</p>
<p>thank you all for your comments!</p>
<p>You have to read the fine print on the Brown page: 24% of 1642 vals were accepted. 9% of 17,637 from schools that don’t rank. It’s an issue of the magnitude. Of admits, 396 were val, 1575 from non-ranking. But I agree, sal looks problematic. </p>
<p>In the end, so much is fuzzy in the numbers. Sals can be at a disadvantage when their val also applies (and both have great apps.) Colleges sometimes only plan one admit from a hs, depending, to spread the wealth around that area, so to say. If sal is the only obviously top choice from the hs, I don’t think there’s an inherent issue- ie that not being #1 shreds you.</p>
<p>And don’t forget that you’re not just reviewed on stats/rank. The whole picture has to come through. Sometimes, the kid with side interests reflected in the transcript and app can be appealing. It’s a holistic thing.</p>
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That depends on the school. Our high school declared the val after the first marking period senior year. I don’t know of any vals that actually ended up with lower grades by the end of the year. Somewhere there was a study of acceptances at one of the Ivies and to my surprise being number one in the class was markedly better than whatever the next step down was. I hate that you have to play these games. My sil lost her val place because she took Orchestra (no weighting). That despite that she took it on top of the number of courses the other kid took. (Thirty years later she’s still sore about it!) Years ago Harvard liked to boast they reject half the vals who apply if that makes you feel better. But that’s a lot better than the 90% they reject otherwise! (Don’t know what the figures are now.) My son’s year #1 got into Harvard, #2 applied ED elsewhere, #3 was waitlisted, #8 got in too.</p>
<p>The Dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science after asking his audience to raise their hand if they’d been rejected from MIT (nearly everyone), gave a lovely talk about the joys of being number two. (He’d been sal of his class.) Don’t let it define you.</p>
<p>I’m confused about something. Don’t colleges recompute grades anyway? Our local high school didn’t weight grades at all and it wasn’t uncommon for kids in less demanding classes to be named valedictorian. In those cases, the lower ranked kids were accepted to higher ranked schools. Also, haven’t a lot of schools abandoned ranking entirely? The school my kids attended had no rankings and no distinctions in class levels (for the most part). Kids competed to deliver the valedictory speech and were voted in by the student body. There was no salutatorian.</p>
<p>Yes colleges recalculate GPAs. My daughter’s HS weights honors by adding .33 and for AP/IB it adds .43. They also rank.</p>
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<p>A regular- or even honors-level high school class in web design is likely to be so basic as to be functionally useless – it is almost invariably dumbed down so that those students even in the bottom half of the class can successfully complete it.</p>
<p>My son was able to take his required art classes at the local university and take 300-level (college junior) digital design classes (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) which are useful tools needed to assist in building web pages. In his high school, college courses counted the same as AP classes.</p>
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<p>I don’t believe for one minute that colleges receiving 25,000 or 30,000 apps pore through the minutia and recalculate GPA’s. For one thing, some schools give only letter grades such as A, B, C. Others give A-, B+ and so forth. Still others give H for honors. Many schools have “obscure” names for classes – is Society & Culture a history class, a sociology class? Plus, you can’t just claim that schools calculate based only on the cores of English, foreign language, math, science and history – because for students interested in the arts or in schools with excellent theater or music programs, it would be stupid to ignore the grades students got in art, photography, music, theater, and so forth. I can certainly see how it can be recalculated in something like the UC’s where there is a “common language” and common format across the state, but nationwide? I don’t believe it for an instant. Based on everything I’ve seen, I think elite schools basically squint at this to compare.</p>