valedictorian GPA issues

September 25, 2007 12:43 PM

Valedictorian/Saluditorian/Class rank GPA issues.

My school is having issues similar to the Blair Hornstine saga with a bit of a twist.
We're on the 4.0 GPA scale with APs weighted an extra point (A=5, B=4, etc). In the senior class, we have 3 students who've had all As and taken all 5 AP courses we offer. Problem is that the student with the fewest credits technically ends up valedictorian because the weighted AP classes have a greater effect on their GPA- hence where the Blair Hornstine example comes into place. However, in this case, the credit differences are due to study halls (0 credits) and independent study courses.

I'm curious if anyone has similar experiences at their schools and how have they dealt with it. Make all three students co-valedictorian? Just do away with class rank and create high honors? Some secret formula to determine class rank? Am I overthinking this? Any ideas are welcome.

posted by jmd82 to education (48 comments total)

Haha, I remember that happening at my school. They changed all the AP classes from 5 points to 4.3 or something like that. I remember being pissed because my GPA would be lower than everyone who graduated the year before me. In my case, the valedictorian got there by cheating, and I, (the salutatorian or 2nd guy or whatever) didn't bother going to graduation or mentioning it on my resume, so it didn't really matter.
posted by pravit at 12:45 PM on September 25, 2007

At my high school, my friend had the higest GPA. But #2 was very close, and her mom bitched to the administration, so we had co-valedictorians. Which was totally lame- my friend worked really hard, and #2 had no interest in making a speech, anyway.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:47 PM on September 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

Since when are there rules for picking valedictorian? Can't the Principal just pick one by fiat? Don't some school have what amounts to a popularity contest to elect a valedictorian? Perhaps I am just getting old and sensitive about people stading on my lawn.
posted by GuyZero at 12:52 PM on September 25, 2007

At my school they had three co-valedictorians, one based on grades, one chosen by the administration and one chosen by a student committee.
posted by atomly at 12:58 PM on September 25, 2007

It's a silly concept in general, but were I the principal and felt forced to continue the tradition, I'd pick the person with the most extracurricular achievements.
posted by Miko at 1:01 PM on September 25, 2007

You could take the number of credits your highest-credited graduating student has and then use that to scale the other grades. If your highest-credited student has 132 hours of credit, you would multiply his or her GPA times his or her credit earned then divide that by 132. Students with fewer hours would get their GPA multiplied by their own credits earned then divided by 132 as well.

Top credit earner:
4.0*132/132=4.0

Other student:
4.0*120/132=3.63

This should eliminate the extra weight AP classes are getting with your student who has fewer credits. You may still get stuck with a tie though.
posted by Benjy at 1:03 PM on September 25, 2007

At my high school, we had five or six valedictorians and they decided amongst themselves who would make the graudation speech.
posted by moosedogtoo at 1:05 PM on September 25, 2007

This is why the 4.0 (A/B/C/D) scale is silly.
Switch to an actual percentage grade, and you won't have these sorts of issues (since no one should get 100%).

Regardless, if the formula you have enacted decides a clear winner, and it sounds like it has, then I think you are morally bound to follow it and have the student with the fewest credits be the Valedictorian.
posted by madajb at 1:15 PM on September 25, 2007

In the senior class, we have 3 students who've had all As and taken all 5 AP courses we offer.

Then they're tied. They have all done the best that they can possibly do. The credits thing is irrelevant in this case.
posted by vacapinta at 1:19 PM on September 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

At my former high school, they cap the number of courses per year at 6. So the people taking extra classes wouldn't gain any benefit.
posted by smackfu at 1:20 PM on September 25, 2007

My high school banned the whole valedictorian thing and refused to rank students because this sort of thing got so out of hand. We had an essay contest to see who could give the graduation speech. The student who wrote the best speech/essay got to read it. Sooooo much better, in my opinion.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 1:21 PM on September 25, 2007 [2 favorites]

I was in the same situation, having maxed out on AP classes, but having the ratio of AP courses to non-AP courses skewing the results.

Regardless, the whole concept of valedictorian is flawed.

My story: I was technically ranked 1st in my class until a transfer student bumped me down. The transfer student's grades were on another school's 100 point system and once converted to the 4.0 system (with a 5.0 for AP courses), his was absurdedly high. Something like 0.3 higher than any other student, and a weighted GPA that was impossible if you'd done all 4 years at our school.

Given the tight clustering, once I became ranked 2nd, many other students went down from, say, 6th, to 11th, due to ties.

The school "officially" did away with the valedictorian distinction and in all my letters of collection recommendation, teachers claimed I was ranked first in the class but couldn't say I was valedictorian.

Rather than having the new 1st in our class student give a speech, they held open tryouts for the graduation speech. This was fine by me since I didn't have much to say anyway.

Unfortunately, even though the school officially abolished the title, the transfer student was still introduced, during the graduation ceremony, as the Valedictorian, which ticked me off. *shakes angry fist*

Sadly, I don't think there's any good solution that pleases everyone involved.
posted by kathryn at 1:22 PM on September 25, 2007

You could take the number of credits your highest-credited graduating student has and then use that to scale the other grades.

This has the same problem as the original questioner, because AP course A's are worth 5 points. So the valedictorian ends up being the person with the greatest proportion of AP classes to regular classes. But the # of AP classes is capped, so it's actually the person with the least regular classes. Cruel.
posted by smackfu at 1:23 PM on September 25, 2007

At my high school (at least when I graduated, in 1989), we had the same situation where AP classes counted +1 above the normal score towards GPA (and we also had "honors" classes, which were +0.5). All graduating seniors with a GPA of 4.00 or higher (there were five of us, in my class) were declared co-valedictorians.

However, there was no valedictory speech - a graduation speech was given by a member of the class elected by the graduates.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:32 PM on September 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

Why do the AP students have to take study halls or independent study courses? In my (very competitive) high school, most of the honors & AP kids didn't have lunch let alone a study hall. Some of us doubled up on languages, others took extra classes for fun like various arts, music, history, politics, English classes just for the hell of it. Some people took both AP Lit & AP Composition as well.

Now, those kids deserved valedictorian. Me? I took 3 APs, a couple regular classes to meet requirements, and 2 study halls. And in the end, I'm farther along in life than a lot of my overachieving peers from high school. Neener neener.
posted by dumbledore69 at 1:32 PM on September 25, 2007

Problem is that the student with the fewest credits technically ends up valedictorian because the weighted AP classes have a greater effect on their GPA

If this was intentional--if this student gamed the system, so to speak--then he wins. Cos that's pretty rad.
posted by uncleozzy at 1:34 PM on September 25, 2007

My school system assigned what they called "quality-effort points." IIRC, it simply added the grade point value of each credit. For example, a student who earned A's in five 1-credit classes would receive 20 QEP's. We also had weighted grades for honors and AP classes. This system was implemented in response to students who would take only the minimum number or courses, all honors/AP, and invariably end up with a higher GPA/class rank than the student who filled his schedule with extra languages, electives, etc.
posted by ferociouskitty at 1:37 PM on September 25, 2007

Switch to an actual percentage grade, and you won't have these sorts of issues (since no one should get 100%).

This is the best way to do things, except it encourages the same gaming of the system. They gave the top 20 or so students honors, except I got missed by a half a percent along with a few others. This sucked for those of us who picked elective courses senior year that were also college credit rather than "gimme" classes. For instances I received at 95.8 or some odd percentage in H. Physics II that came with so many college credits. A lot of seniors decided to take things such as golf, which is great, but is a guaranteed 100%. (Of course there were those that gamed it further by selecting which teachers they got, basically the kids who whined the most and squeezed every last percent of a test received several hundredths of a percent more than the rest of us. In reality I didn't care then, nor now, but some people took it very, very seriously).

Our school went further and the valedictorians were for service, integrity, etc. The student body and teachers just elected the most personable kid who was also probably in a few honors classes to make him seem smart.

The far worse crime was that a percentage grading scale didn't transfer well to colleges. You'd see silly things like 4.5/4.0 for some colleges which implied all As or so in AP or equivalent classes. If you're doing a 100% scale, the 100% is the limit and you cannot go over 4.0 unless you recalculated everything based on classes (our school didn't, I don't think any did).

But to answer your question, I would due away with it as it encourages gaming the system for what amounts to be a relatively meaningless award. Going by fiat and emphasizing things such as a service and extracurriculars is probably the least offensive way to go. I just remember the only ones making a large row over it and feeling offended were a select few, very vocal over-achievers.
posted by geoff. at 1:39 PM on September 25, 2007

In my high school, which had the same point system, honors students regularly took more lunches or study halls rather than elective classes for the sole purpose of boosting their GPAs in this way. I don't have a good solution (I guess I would go for naming all three valedictorian and choosing a speech-giver in some other way), but I do think it's worth considering this problem if you can influence how GPAs are calculated at your school.
posted by lgyre at 1:39 PM on September 25, 2007

Yeah, this happened at our school. Two students took the same amount (all of them offered, if I recall correctly) of AP classes (for us, the weighting was 6.33 for an A+ in an AP class), and they had nearly identical grades. But one had taken a study hall whilst the other had taken a regular class.
Our valedictorian was the study hall guy. It may not be fair, but it's how the rules were written, and they weren't going to change them for us, since our rankings had already been calculated under that system and the school board felt it would be unfair to change the criteria and possibly affect more people's rankings. They *did* change it (and unfortunately, I don't know how), but only put the new rules into effect for incoming freshmen for the next year.
Looking back, I think that's fair. We all knew the rules going in, and while no where did it explicitly state that having study hall would help, it was a direct result of the rules as they were written. That guy was just clever enough to make use of it.
posted by solotoro at 1:40 PM on September 25, 2007

If the students have been told that the V will be based on a particular formula, then I think you have to stick with the formula. No fair changing it after the school (or some students) sees that the outcome isn't what they expected. Change it for future classes if it's a problem, but for this year the smart slacker gets to be the valedictorian.
posted by Mavri at 1:41 PM on September 25, 2007

My school had a vote, which turned into a popularity contest. The guy who won was an average or below average student with no real interest in school. His role as valedictorian is best remembered for his coordination of a scavenger hunt that resulted in endorsed theft, vandalism and illegal reckless behavior. Grades were not even a consideration. The administration felt that students should choose someone who best reflected what they wanted to see in a valedictorian. I personally think that there should have been some sort of academic criteria.

But, if you go to GPAs, you're dealing with a bunch of issues. Some people may have had heavier course loads. Some may have managed scholastics, athletics, volunteerism and a job. So you could pick the top several students and put that to a vote. I don't suggest putting the entire graduating class population to a vote, though, or you'll end up with what my school had.
posted by acoutu at 1:43 PM on September 25, 2007

My children's school separated valedictorian from graduation speaker. Being a very academically intense school, they decided NOT to give extra weight to AP classes for determing class rank (students already felt pushed to take more AP classes than were good for them.) There were quite a few students with perfect 4.0 who were designated valedictorian. Separately, anyone who wanted to address the class at graduation could compete for one of the three spots (chosen by adults - I'm not sure who)
posted by metahawk at 1:57 PM on September 25, 2007

I don't think there's anything wrong with making them all co-valedictorians, and that's my preferred solution.

Despite what the letter of the policy says, it clearly doesn't serve the overall goal of identifying the "best" student. It's unfair to deprive the title of valedictorian from the low-credit student, who relied on the policy, but naming only the low-credit student as valedictorian fails to identify the "best" students.

I don't think anyone will be harmed by being named co-valedictorian (versus sole valedictorian), but refusing to name the high-credit students as co-valedictorians could significantly hurt their college admissions prospects. Not naming the high-credit students as co-valedictorians gives the impression to admissions committees that someone in their class had better academic performance, and it doesn't sound like that is the case.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 2:02 PM on September 25, 2007

Ugh, please don't put it to a vote. If your school is like mine was, there are about a million opportunities to let the popular kids know how popular they are. They don't need valedictorian too (unless they earned it).
posted by Mavri at 2:02 PM on September 25, 2007

The far worse crime was that a percentage grading scale didn't transfer well to colleges. You'd see silly things like 4.5/4.0 for some colleges which implied all As or so in
AP or equivalent classes. If you're doing a 100% scale, the 100% is the limit and you cannot go over 4.0 unless you recalculated everything based on classes.
Yes, it does make things difficult on college transcripts. My school sent along a conversion chart type deal with the grades in your transcript.
However, it is still fundamentally more honest than someone getting an 4.0, which is essentially a meaningless metric.
You can always game the system in any ranking, but a 100 point scale (for everything, tests, papers, not just final grades) makes it more difficult, since the "fudge-factor" of the A/B/C ranking is much reduced.
A lot of seniors decided to take things such as golf, which is great, but is a guaranteed 100%
My school did not count PE/gym in calculating your final grade. Gym was more or less pass/fail.
posted by madajb at 2:12 PM on September 25, 2007

I was involved in basically the same situation when I graduated. The administration decided to have co-valedictorians, each giving a speech. Honestly it wasn't a big deal to me and given the option, I would have chosen not to give a speech mostly because I was a terrible public speaker. Only later did I realize that some schools separate class rank from speaking duties. I think everyone would benefit from hearing a speech that was voted on or somehow selected for its content or the speaker's skills.
posted by Durin's Bane at 2:13 PM on September 25, 2007

Mavri: it hadn't occurred to me that the top 3 students would be popular. However, I went to a working class high school where getting more than a B was enough to land you in purgatory.
posted by acoutu at 2:16 PM on September 25, 2007

From my experience in life, that you were #1 of however many doesn't matter to most employers. The last place law student graduating from William and Mary still graduated from Willam and Mary.

It might matter when competing for a scholarship, but once you get your college degree, I don't know of anyone that really cares if you are first or last at your high school. Most employers, which is who you want to impress, care what your last education/job was more than anything else.
posted by slavlin at 2:19 PM on September 25, 2007

I don't see anything wrong with the person you describe being labeled valedictorian. At your school, valedictorian is the student who has the highest weighted average according to a certain formula, and that's the student with fewer credits. So?

I think the real answer is "It doesn't matter."

All of these students will have a very high class rank; being labeled second or third won't hurt them.

Any selective college that wants to can recalculate GPAs according to their own weighting scheme, so if all three apply to the same college the lower-credit student might well be assigned a GPA score lower than the other two. Likewise, it seems difficult to believe that faced with two students of otherwise identical GPAs, one of which took a bunch of study halls and the other took actual courses instead, any selective college would choose the study-haller over the real-course-taker if it came down to that.

I assure you that in five years exactly zero people other than the three people involved will care. In which case, why invest energy in changing from one arbitrary standard for determining valedictorian to another equally arbitrary standard?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:22 PM on September 25, 2007

You could always ask the students in question how they think the situation should be handled.
posted by Reggie Digest at 2:25 PM on September 25, 2007

My high school class had two valedictorians, and both spoke briefly, which was all right. My sister's class had about seven, and they agreed among themselves that there should be only one speech, and decided who should give it—some unforeseeable miracle preventing any well-meaning adult from imposing an ill-conceived further decision algorithm upon them.

In your situation, the any-above-4.0 rule sounds pretty good.

Obligatory story about the meaninglessness of pretending we can quantify the quality of a student to the second decimal place: My senior year, I heard some indignation from my physics teacher concerning a classmate of mine. She had earned an A in each class up till this time, and was now worried that she might get, gasp, an A-minus, in AP Calculus, and wanted to drop it in the middle of the term. (The Calc teacher and my physics teacher were pals, whence the grapevine.)

At this point I realized two things: First, that I could not recall seeing this student in any other AP or honors class (and I took all of them), though she clearly had the stuff it took; and second, that my A-minus in the first semester of 9th-grade State History had spared me from a pernicious brand of insanity, aspiratio valedictare by name.

At the same time the Calculus teacher realized that letting a student set back her own college education and deprive herself of a beautiful and useful branch of mathematics for the sake of a word on a resumé would be a horrible error, and told the student that her ill-advised request was denied.

The student wound up earning an unqualified A in AP Calculus. She did, however, pull down a minus in Physics. This left the valedictory spot to the two classmates I mentioned—both of whom had been taking the tough classes from the get-go. I am not the only geek who rejoiced.
posted by eritain at 2:27 PM on September 25, 2007

My high school used an honors system instead of class rank. Of course, it was based on class rank, but you weren't told your rank or GPA--just whether you got honors or not. The cutoff was roughly top 15%, but it wasn't an official cutoff, just a rule of thumb, so that the administration could tweak it for situations like this. It seemed to serve the purpose of recognizing high GPAs while not creating a competitive frenzy.

Valedictorian was elected by the student body; you had to be graduating with honors to run for the position. I think this it was a good system. (I also like the systems described of voting based on the speech, but it has the potential downside of leaking the speech to the whole class in advance. Maybe a committee of students and/or teachers to vote on the speech?) In your case, I'd probably let all three kids call themselves valedictorian and let them make speeches if they want.
posted by phoenixy at 2:39 PM on September 25, 2007

I don't remember how they decided the valedictorian at my high school (I got two B's in PE so it didn't affect me). However, my sister was one of about forty valedictorians at her high school because they just said anyone with straight A's was one. I thought that was pretty savvy because it meant there was no question of picking one, declaring three or four, or anything else. Valedictorians were like an uber-honor-roll, not some solitary god of academics.

I didn't even know the valedictorian was supposed to be the graduation speaker. We definitely didn't do that because the speakers were total dullards. I don't know who picked them. I guess I wasn't very engaged in my high school's planning and processes...
posted by crinklebat at 2:48 PM on September 25, 2007

I didn't even know the valedictorian was supposed to be the graduation speaker.

The word "valedictorian" originally meant the person who gave the valedictory (or farewell) address.
posted by grouse at 2:58 PM on September 25, 2007

My school didn't rank by GPA because most people took at least 5 AP classes and had bloated their averages. Ranking would've bounced all the reasonably successful non-AP kids into such a low percentile that they'd look like idiots compared to students at other schools.

But they did count GPAs for valedictorian honors; we had 10 valedictorians the year I graduated, which I thought was pretty ridiculous. (One student deserved a B in one of her final classes, but she still got an A. That teacher didn't want to be the one who ruined it for her, I suppose.)
posted by phatkitten at 3:13 PM on September 25, 2007

the valedictorian is the farewell address speaker, not the person with the highest grades.

my high school class elected our valedictorian. gpa had nothing to do with it. if you want to recognize exceptional students, "high honors" is a good solution.
posted by thinkingwoman at 3:15 PM on September 25, 2007

Dang, I didn't expect so many responses but it has been an enlightening discussion with some ideas I will pass on to the powers at be. I have some say it what happens, but the final decision is not mine.
Anyways, some responses to the awesome comments so far:

We had an essay contest to see who could give the graduation speech. The student who wrote the best speech/essay got to read it. Sooooo much better, in my opinion.
We do that already for graduation speeches and it works out. You could say the top ranks are for college purposes here.

My story: I was technically ranked 1st in my class until a transfer student bumped me down.
We compromised by factoring in a transfer student's junior year. That way if the slacked off, they can't come here in get straight-As and "wipe the slate clean" while getting some credit if they were an all-star student.

If you're doing a 100% scale, the 100% is the limit and you cannot go over 4.0 unless you recalculated everything based on classes (our school didn't, I don't think any did).
The HS I graduated from did the same thing- except you got +8% and +4% for AP and Honors classes, respectively.
I personally like the idea of doing away with the 4.0 scale. Alas, that decisions lays with the school board and we're nowhere close to going the percentile route. Plus, the 4.0 scale makes it easy for teachers to just plug in grades!

She had earned an A in each class up till this time, and was now worried that she might get, gasp, an A-minus, in AP Calculus, and wanted to drop it in the middle of the term. (The Calc teacher and my physics teacher were pals, whence the grapevine.)
I've always been told it looks bad to drop an AP class mid-tetm. Makes it look like you're padding your resume to say, "HEY, I had an AP class!"

My school system assigned what they called "quality-effort points." IIRC, it simply added the grade point value of each credit. For example, a student who earned A's in five 1-credit classes would receive 20 QEP's. We also had weighted grades for honors and AP classes.
That was actually my original idea and I think is the best mathematical solution. I'm gonna have to do some testing to see how it works out.

That said, I didn't realize there were so many issues like this out there!! In lieu of this I'm thinking that maybe the best solution is just to have high honors at a certain GPA threshold. Do away with valedictorian and keep ranking just for colleges if they want them.

Oh, and no voting for valedictorian. Homecoming court has courted enough drama that way it is!
posted by jmd82 at 3:18 PM on September 25, 2007

They should be honest that the grading system does not have the resolution to determine the best with any precision.

The QEP (really, it's credit-hours) system provides the opposite incentive. 5 regular classes tie 4 AP classes. Is that what you want?
posted by a robot made out of meat at 4:42 PM on September 25, 2007

When I went to school back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, AP classes had the same A=4.0 as every other class. I took nothing but college prep courses (calc, physics, all that fun stuff) and graduated with a GPA of 3.9. The girl who became valedictorian had a GPA of 4.0 and got it with classes in typing, business admin, etc. Heck, if were going for pure points, I would've taken weightlifting and basket weaving.

The teachers in my school all shrugged 'cause, eh, whatchagonnado. Everyone in school knew who earned it and who gamed it. Besides, my best friend was ranked 3rd and that dude was way smarter in math than I was (I only beat him because I was better at english and science.) Tradition dictated that the salutatorian (me) give the prayer and number 3 give the welcome speech. I hinted--tongue in cheek of course--to the graduation committee that my prayer might very well be in the Old Testament style, what with the ground opening up and fire raining from the heavens to consume the drug users and fornicators. So they gave that job to my best friend, third in a class of 500 and something.

It's a stupid ranking system. Whatever, my welcome speech was way better than the valedictorian and I've never once encountered a job that required my grades from high school. So it goes.

(signs your yearbook),
posted by Tacodog at 5:21 PM on September 25, 2007

My school gave the title "valedictory scholar" to anyone who had >=4.0. Since we gave 5 points for IB classes and most reasonably smart kids took at least 3-4 of those, we had six or seven every year. These students would vote amongst themselves for the graduation speaker. Beyond this, there were no class ranks.
This system seemed to work pretty well and it didn't penalize students for taking unweighted electives, provided they earned A's. In this case, I'm with the people who say don't change the system in the middle of the year even if it means the better student doesn't get to be valedictorian. If the student who is technically valedictorian is particularly gracious, he/she might offer to share the speech but if not, you have to stick with the rules you started with.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 5:31 PM on September 25, 2007

Do it unweighted? Just ignore the 5 points for AP thing. At my high school, the benefit for taking ap/ib/honors classes was a set amount added to your GPA. My final GPA was over 6 (out of "4"), and I had nothing close to straight As. The way our system worked we had IB kids and "Traditional" kids, each with their own Valedictorian(s), just because the spread was so ridiculous.

Do it unweighted, if you want it just for college applications and such.
posted by that girl at 5:34 PM on September 25, 2007

This happened to me. I had the highest overall grades, but I had extra unweighted As from as far back as 8th grade courses taken at the high school, and I took band, so was prevented from taking a full day of AP courses my senior year. I sucked it up, assumed an unceremonious third position in my class--only valedictorian and salutatorian were noted in the proceedings--and now I'm making myself happy by kicking ass in college.

Our GPAs were literally within thousandths of each other in the top three--they rounded them strangely and I think even looked at exam scores in order to differentiate us. It was so traumatic back then, but now? I don't think anyone really even remembers much of that after two years.

Moral of the story: hahahaha, suck it, high school.
posted by rhoticity at 6:43 PM on September 25, 2007

My high school put a cap on the number of honors classes(A=5) that would be considered in calculating class rank. Since people taking honors classes generally got A's in all of their non-honors classes, there were always a bazillion people tied for first.

It would make more sense to me to put a cap on the total number of all classes. That way you reward people who take more honors classes without giving an advantage to people who try to pad their GPA with non-honors classes. There might still be big ties for first place, but then people who want to "game the system" have to take more honors classes rather than fewer. Also, with a cap on the total number of classes, people would have an opportunity to take a class or two just for fun.
posted by Zach! at 7:17 PM on September 25, 2007

Our (California) high school honors all who achieve all A's throughout their high school careers, and also gives weight to courses considered college-prep, that is to say UC- or CSU-approved classes. We have had as many as 7 valedictorians in classes as small as 50 and each is offered the opportunity to speak, although some will choose to do it together and some will decline. Another nice tradition is that the school colors are black, cardinal red and white. At graduation, girls wear cardinal red, boys wear black and California Scholarship Foundation life members (high-academic achievers) wear white. It looks very impressive at the graduation ceremony, especially in years where there are a large amount of CSF life members.
posted by Lynsey at 9:04 PM on September 25, 2007

This has the same problem as the original questioner, because AP course A's are worth 5 points. So the valedictorian ends up being the person with the greatest proportion of AP classes to regular classes. But the # of AP classes is capped, so it's actually the person with the least regular classes. Cruel.

Yes, but the person with the greatest proportion of AP classes is being penalized at the same time for having fewer overall credits. Thus, they are getting *more* weight given to their AP courses, but the very fact that those classes count more due to being averaged in with fewer credits is counteracted by dividing by the number of credits they *could* have earned. The worse I can see resulting from this is a tie. It's the same principle as quality points at the college level.
posted by Benjy at 9:37 PM on September 25, 2007

Just make 'em all valedictorians. At my high school, we used the same AP-weighting scheme, and anybody with a GPA >= 4.0 was a valedictorian. There were 11 or so in my class. Nobody cared or made a stink about anything.
posted by equalpants at 11:08 PM on September 25, 2007

In my high school, only classes required for graduation were rated in class rank. Now, some of the requirements were along the lines of "two years of math," and this was always weighted in the student's best interests. So a student who got a B one semester in U. S. History or another class specifically required to graduate would be ranked behind one who got Cs for two years in math as long as the sometimes-C student also had four semesters of As.

As a result, when our class ranks were given out, I had the highest GPA but a lower actual class rank than two other students. I was working on a strongly-worded letter to the school board about policy when the principal suggested that we actually look up policy to quote it. I was then reminded that my fourth year of JROTC (which was the most advantageous possible credit of, believe it or not, physical education--they were at that time interchangeable in SC) should have had a higher weight than they'd given it.

Lesson 1: If the system decides to manipulate you, manipulate it back.
Lesson 2: There is no fair way to determine class rank. If you weight everything equally, then someone can take easy classes and coast to the top. If you use the standard weighted system and count everything, taking fewer general classes and electives will cause the students who took as many classes as possible and still excelled to lose points. If you only weigh the classes that actually count for graduation, a situation like mine occurs. All in all, I like Equalpants's solution.
posted by Cricket at 2:50 PM on September 26, 2007