How do you feel about the elimination of valedictorians in high schools across the nation?

Question

Anyone can answer...all views are accepted... :)...especially those who have been personally affected by this issue.

I've read articles about the possible elimination of the title of valedictorian in schools because of the competition. Do you think that this is valid? Is it right to take away the honors of a hard-working student and replace them with group honors such as "cumlaude", top 10, etc.? Is it right to punish the hard-working students because mediocre students have figured out ways to beat the GPA system? After looking at all view points, there has to be a way to help the hard-working students while preventing the others from beating the system with weird GPA-raising tactics...right? What are your views?

Answer 1

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just another symptom of dumbing down of America--

unfortunately the reasons given for this-- simply mask the real reasons.

Answer 2

As I said before:

I graduated from a high school that did not even have a class ranking system. However, it was not like the top students were disenfranchised because of that. Those that deserved to go to the ivies went to the ivies. No one was cheated out of a future because they didn't make valedictorian or summa cumlaude.

Valedictorian is just a title. After all, no one truly cares if you were the top in your class after the first year of college. No one cares the rank you had in college after your first or second job. All valedictorian gives you is bragging rights.

Ranking systems are skewed anyways. I've seen people with 3.0's get into better colleges than people with 3.8's because of the types of classes they took and their SAT scores.

Answer 3

at my high school, our GPAs were on a 5 point scale. so honors and AP classes were weighted on a 6-point scale. so basically having a 5.5 was like having a 105 average, if that makes sense.

but i think it is really really stupid to punish a student who works hard in the name of not offending anyone, and to lower competition. so many things in life are competitive, and high school is one of them.

Answer 4

i think its a dumb idea.  mostly because the year i graduated my school decided not to have valedictorians anymore, and I would have been it.  i was quite upset about it, but the school board voted on it the year before because there was a tie for valedictorian and both student's families were upset and wanted something done about it.