<p>well what happened was…</p>
<p>you were like ‘omg it would ruin society if people were more equal. so dumb.’ in response to me saying it’s sad people’s abilities are so unequal.</p>
<p>so then that point got debated. as i see it, arguably you were the one that took the thread off its tracks :). </p>
<p>yeah, i’m from california too.</p>
<p>Grinders, heroes, subs, hoagies… all the same to me… oh, wait, I just read the post.</p>
<p>I think there are two separate categories being addressed:</p>
<p>1) Students who may not be as intuitive or high IQ as some but who get good grades by dint of hard work in and out of the classroom.</p>
<p>2) Students who game the system by taking the easiest path to a high GPA. In unweighted GPA schools, I’ve seen valedictorians who never took an honors or AP course. As the OP points out, weighted GPAs can also be gamed.</p>
<p>There’s no doubt an overlap of these groups, but it’s far from 100%. I don’t find the first group problematic. In real life, hard work and diligence often lead to greater success than raw smarts. The second group is a little tougher to pin down. On one hand, what they are doing amounts to running a marathon and taking a few shortcuts to lower one’s time. On the other hand, if they are playing by the rules they aren’t really cheating - the system itself is flawed.</p>
<p>No grading system I’ve seen always produces results that everyone would agree are fair. The good thing is that high school GPA will be forgotten shortly after graduation, and very few students won’t get into a good college because of some other student’s course schedule.</p>
<p>Dang, I just saw this thread for the first time, and I was beaten to the sandwich joke.</p>
<p>As for grinders in Red Alert 2, they were totally pointless.</p>
<p>But seriously, if someone’s willing to work harder than you toward the same goal, more power to them. If they don’t have the same goal (e.g. they’re interested only in grades while you care about learning) then ultimately what they do is unlikely to have much effect on you, so again, more power to them.</p>
<p>hmm i didn’t know there were were so many names for sandwiches. </p>
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<p>ah well i would defend the second group by saying it’s completely fine to take shortcuts because they didn’t choose to run the marathon. if you want to run a marathon you should follow the rules. but if you find yourself forced to run one and don’t like it then i see no reason why you shouldn’t take shortcuts if you see them.</p>