Put Your Game Face Back On, Part 2
Speaking of the value of competition, what’s true for sports is true for academics, too.
But here comes the NYT story about graduating classes that sport 7, 9, 10, 23, 30 or more valedictorians. (No, they don’t all give a commencement speech.)
In top suburban schools across the country, the valedictorian, a beloved tradition, is rapidly losing its singular meaning as administrators dispense the title to every straight-A student rather than try to choose the best among them.
One reason schools give for this weaselly practice is that they don’t want to hurt their top students’ chances of getting into the highest tier colleges. Some claim the bar hasn’t been lowered, it’s just that, “[m]ore kids are getting over the bar.” Some are loathe to take into account fractional differences between students’ GPAs. Some schools don’t weigh honors and non-honors classes differently, which results in more kids–some taking less rigorous courses–earning 4.0s.
The 30 valedictorians at Dallas-suburb Stratford High represented about 6.5 percent of the graduating class. Some might call that an example of grade inflation. But it’s worse than that:
“It’s honor inflation,” said Chris Healy, an associate professor at Furman University, who said that celebrating so many students as the best could leave them ill prepared for competition in college and beyond. “I think it’s a bad idea if you’re No. 26 and you’re valedictorian. In the real world, you do get ranked.”
Worrying about top students’ chances of getting into top colleges does not make sense as a reason for this practice. By the time valedictorians are announced, students have already been accepted–and made the first of many payments!– and are firmly entrenched in senior slump.