<p>at my school you have to take the hardest classes the school offers to be the valedictorian</p>
<p>Well, I asked about how the Val is determined and how the weighting works - - how much for honors classes, how much for Dual Enrollment Classes, how much for AP classes - - but everyone is tight-lipped. I'll have to keep asking.</p>
<p>Overall, it sounds like a lot of the Vals that y'all have had are not necessarily the most accomplished people.</p>
<p>At my school, students are ranked based on WEIGHTED GPA. So... that helps to ensure that the students taking the most challenging courses have the highest ranks... of course, AP classes are weighted equally with H ones, so an easily earned A in an H class is equal to a hard earned A in an AP one. But, our system isn't thaaaat messed up, so I can't complain =)</p>
<p>My school has like 10 valedictorians every year for some reason...</p>
<p>I became valedictorian because I took AP Music Theory Sophomore year.
Everybody took honors classes Freshman year, but I didn't get the opportunity. Luckily, taking AP Music Theory and having all As on my transcript helped me rise up to be valedictorian.</p>
<p>It's easy at my school. The valedictorian took all the APs offered (9), got All A's, and was val. That was me =]</p>
<p>My school has separate vals/sals for IB and regular program. Everyone in IB takes 5 or 6 AP, IB, or Honors courses all four years. The people who end up as vals take honors courses as electives or do virtual school or DE. It has become so ridiculous in the past few years that the administration is thinking about banning outside courses and keeping GPA based on the 7 classes you take at school.</p>
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Well, I asked about how the Val is determined and how the weighting works - - how much for honors classes, how much for Dual Enrollment Classes, how much for AP classes - - but everyone is tight-lipped. I'll have to keep asking.
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<p>At my high school, valedictorian is the student with highest weighted average at the end of the third nine weeks of the senior year.</p>
<p>Honors is 5%, dual enrollment classes are 10%, and AP is also 10%.</p>
<p>Dual enrollment weighting is a sham, though. No one in my grade who took dual enrollment classes had their grades weighted 10%. The classes were treated as regular college prep classes and received a weighting of 0%.</p>
<p>When I found out that I had been cheated of 1.2 points in the rankings, it was too late. I sent an e-mail to my counselor, but he didn’t respond, so I assume that those 1.2 points did make a difference.</p>
<p>No one else found out before I did because my high school only shows the non-weighted average on the transcript. The number they use, weighted average, must be requested.</p>
<p>It’s a vestige of the old system. Until last year – the year I graduated – dual enrollment classes were, in fact, treated like regular college prep classes. The administration ostensibly claimed to have changed the formula, but in their sloth, they did nothing and used the same one they’d been using for the last decade or so.</p>
<p>Oh, well. The student in my class who will attend the most prestigious university of us all wasn’t anywhere close to #1 or #2. Instead of focusing on this status title, he improved his academics and extracurriculars. For that, he was duly rewarded with admission to every Top 20 university he applied to.</p>
<p>At my school, the difference between honors and regular, in terms of difficulty, is so vast that weighting grades doesn't help all that much. And AP and Honors are both weighted equally which is stupid, because although I will take more AP courses than anyone else (nobody else knows what self-study is) I won't even make the top 5%, people take Honors and no APs and easily end up in the top 5%. But, starting with my graduating class there won't be any ranking but I'm sure that colleges are still told percentages.</p>
<p>According to the curriculum of my school, rank is based on weighted GRADES so there's no A-, A, A+ system, its just numbers from 0-100. The great thing is that only grades from core classes count so more core classes means a higher rank but we have a handful of electives that we are required to take to graduate. So people that are smart enough to take advantage of this take electives in the summer to take more core. Most students do this to get electives out of the way and have less classes senior year to get out of school early since school is boring for most. Taking easy classes for a higher gpa won't help with rank since CP, Pre-AP, AP, and IB courses have additional points added to the student's final numerical average. No points are added for regular classes, 5 points for CP, 10 for Pre-AP and 13 for AP+IB. Besides rank, GPA is calculated on a 4.0 scale and our school only calculates weighted GPA so its easy to get a 4.0 if you take all Pre-AP classes with the minimum of 80s and above in all core. </p>
<p>Also no close calls for val/sal since weighted numerical grades are recalculated to many decimal places in case of a tie.</p>
<p>From my observations of many of my classmates, I'll say about 10 or less people are using the perks of the system to try to get high ranks and the rest of us don't care about ranks. Even the majority of our top 10% find it impossible to take all AP classes and don't attempt to, but I know that the 10 that are trying to get high ranks are taking IB at a different school and the rest of us are stuck in our high school taking at most 2 APs per year. We aren't that competitive.</p>