Posted on 06/18/2018 12:05:41 PM PDT by bgill
My undergrad college used 3.5 GPA as magna cum laude. My GPA was 3.4999 and they would not round it up. They never received a penny from me thereafter.
I’m so old, I remember when Academy Awards ceremonies intoned, “And the winner is...” Nowadays other award shows follow along with the Academy’s current meme, “And the award goes to...” God forbid there be winners and losers.
At least they didn’t draw straws to determine the valedictorian like in St. Olaf. :P (Golden Girls).
#1 in your class may not mean much.
The valedictorian of my sr class took easy classes and had a 4.0 but scored a 20 on the ACT test. Several others took hard classes and scored above 30.
My dad said he was in the top 10 of his class and expected the same of us kids. Mom let us know that he was 8th...of 9.
Must be an NC thing. I’ve heard NC state gives a 4.5 for an A+, so that you can earn back to a 4.0 if you didn’t get all As in a semester.
Well...I'm of two minds on that.
It definitely is a game. My son's best friend was their class Valedictorian. He worked very hard, but he was a talented musician who stayed away from band, orchestra and chorus because they would have dropped his GPA. In his senior year he received a special exemption to be part of the Jazz band without it counting as a class or him receiving a grade for it! They had a mandatory "keyboarding" (typing) class that he refused to participate in until he was assured that no one was going to be exempt from it. He took the fewest courses possible. The young woman he beat for the top spot took an extra semester of Spanish, which wasn't a "5" class and even though she received an "A", it cost her just enough.
By contrast, I took every class I could. My school offered an optional sixth period, which I took every year. One year I took a seventh period because I couldn't fit all the classes I wanted into my schedule. I took PE, Drivers Ed, and Band as summer classes. You needed 21 credits to graduate and I had 22 going into my Senior year. My folks made me take what was called at the time SLEP tests before my Senior year (they were teachers and made me take just about every test under the sun). The test can give you high school credit for knowledge you have already acquired. I did well. I was exempted from the mandatory 4th year of English, Senior Social Studies (Modern European History), the 4th year of Math, and the 4th year of Science. I took them all anyway, except for the Mod E Hi. The teacher was a tool. I was also able to shoehorn in Band, Orchestra and Chorus. I graduated with 28 credits, a record. You'd think that the effort would have warranted some recognition at Senior Awards night. Nope.
The system isn't set up to recognize achievement outside of their narrow parameters. It doesn't foster the creation of leaders, but instead creates treacherous sheep.
“Treacherous sheep”
That is a good one.
There’s a fool of a host on KFI radio here in LA... his show features liberal politics PLUS comics and the movies made from them... probably video games too, I don’t make a regular habit of listening to his show so I’m not sure about that part.
I won a chugging contest at my highschool.
All the high-achievers are honored. Don’t buy into this BS.
Can't say I'm bitter, I know what I did, and that is good enough. But to the point of this story, can't say I have a huge problem with a school dropping the V and S designations.
There is always someone who knows how to work the system. In my HS, it worked the other way around. The valedictorian took lots of easy classes to get As instead of taking the super hard choices. There was no difference between an A in home ec and an A in physics.
I’m WAY past HS and don’t care at all. My advice is not to sweat it. If we’re more than a few years past HS age, then we shouldn’t be focused on our glory days as the prom queen, the quarterback, the valedictorian, or any of the rest of it. We should be focused on the present with plans for the future, doing our best with whatever gifts we have. Carrying resentment over a past event (especially one we can’t change or fix) only robs us of happiness in the present.
They are not the minority that counts.
Nice...nicely done dad and son...
We put kiddo into a little 2 half day/wk church preschool. All but one of those kids graduated with honors. Don’t know if it was proactive parents or the little preschool or what but throughout my years of teaching, I could identify kids coming out of there. All top students.
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