The pre-med from hell??

[ciao_yall]

Got curious, since I'm currently a Texas resident, and looked for information on the valedictorian scholarship. According to https://tea.texas.gov/academics/graduation-information/highest-ranking-graduate, the scholarship is actually for the highest ranking graduate as determined by local policy, not the valedictorian. The Q&A suggests some schools may limit valedictorian to students who've been at the school for four years. I suspect course weighting, or lack thereof, may also play a role. Either way, due process requires exhausting administrative remedies, such as appeals to school board, before going to court.

Thanks for this. Yikes. Sounds like high stakes + non-objective = recipe for trouble.

[marshwiggle]

Got curious, since I'm currently a Texas resident, and looked for information on the valedictorian scholarship. According to https://tea.texas.gov/academics/graduation-information/highest-ranking-graduate, the scholarship is actually for the highest ranking graduate as determined by local policy, not the valedictorian. The Q&A suggests some schools may limit valedictorian to students who've been at the school for four years. I suspect course weighting, or lack thereof, may also play a role. Either way, due process requires exhausting administrative remedies, such as appeals to school board, before going to court.

Thanks for this. Yikes. Sounds like high stakes + non-objective = recipe for trouble.

Yeah, "local policy" sounds like it could mean "whatever the Powers-That-Be at a given school choose today".

[RatGuy]

Twenty years on, this story still gets told at family functions: My sister was ranked #2 (out of a class of about 350) at a school in west Houston. Iirc, the school's GPA was out of 6 -- as in, an A in an AP course awarded 6 points, while an A may be 4 or 5 points depending on the tier of the class itself. My sister was in band, considered "honors" class but not an AP class, while the valedictorian took an evening class at the local junior college during her senior year. Val's parents petitioned the school board to decree that the JuCo credit should be considered an "AP" course since it was a duel-enrollment situation. I mean those parents ranted and raved and made a stink. Ultimately it was something like a ten-thousandth of a point which separated Val and my sister. I think my sister's friends were more upset than she was for not being valedictorian.-- my sister did not want to give a speech at graduation, and she was going to school out of state anyway. The valedictorian went on to be arrested for credit card fraud her first semester as a Longhorn.

[Hibush]

Thanks RatGuy! Sometimes fiction is the best medium for exploring the motivations that drive real situations. (Do academics call this genre speculative history or something that presumes more truth?)

[Caracal]

Got curious, since I'm currently a Texas resident, and looked for information on the valedictorian scholarship. According to https://tea.texas.gov/academics/graduation-information/highest-ranking-graduate, the scholarship is actually for the highest ranking graduate as determined by local policy, not the valedictorian. The Q&A suggests some schools may limit valedictorian to students who've been at the school for four years. I suspect course weighting, or lack thereof, may also play a role. Either way, due process requires exhausting administrative remedies, such as appeals to school board, before going to court.

Thanks for this. Yikes. Sounds like high stakes + non-objective = recipe for trouble.

Yeah, talk about creating terrible incentives. The whole idea of valedictorian already encourages unhealthy completion and  students to care about the wrong things even if you don't tie it into a big financial reward.

[mamselle]

Some of us might have been valedictorians and weren't like that...

M.

[Caracal]

Some of us might have been valedictorians and weren't like that...

M.

I'm sure most valedictorians are lovely people. I just think tying this prestigious thing which sometimes brings financial rewards to only grades is a terrible idea. If someone gave me 200 dollars to give as a prize to my class, I'd probably give it to the best final paper or something. That would be rewarding the student who had gone above and beyond to write a good paper. I certainly wouldn't give it to the student with the highest numeric grade. That would just encourage students to fixate on small point differences on exams.

[mythbuster]

We used to have a departmental award for the highest GPA in the major, and it was entirely just about the grades. Until the year that I wrote an un-recommendation letter to the awards committee about the person who was on track to win. I had direct evidence that this student hated the field and had active plans to get as far from it as possible. This person was also a grade grubber of the worst variety, egged on by parents who focused on all the wrong things. As a result, the committee changed their approach. They considered the top 10 GPA students, and asked them to submit a resume of their achievements in the field. Surprise! Grade grubber refused to even submit anything, convinced that it was some sort of scam. So a much more deserving student who had passion for the field won the award instead. This new method is now how we evaluate the award every year.

[the_geneticist]

One of my pet peeves: students saying they are "pre-med" before they have completed any coursework/internships/MCAT exam.
You are not a pre-med yet, especially not if you are still in high school.  You think you want to be a physician/surgeon/dermatologist, but you haven't done anything to show that you have any of the skills or knowledge.  Heck, my undergraduate college wouldn't accept you into a major until you passed certain courses.  I was classified as "biology interest" until I passed the intro series (plus a year of chem & a year of physics).  Declaring "pre-med interest" would have meant yet another list of courses (ethics, writing, foreign language, organic chemistry, & biochem).

[kaysixteen]

Out of curiosity, how many of us were hs valedictorians?

[Hegemony]

Not me, because I didn't take the two weighted classes that the other high-finishers did.

[downer]

Fortunately we didn't have such a category where I went. Sounds horrific.

[cathwen]

Not me.  I was eighth in a class of 350, so not too shabby.  I honestly can't remember who the valedictorian was.

[wareagle]

Not me, either.  My high school did not rank people.  We had no valedictorian.

That said, I had the third-highest GPA in the class of about 300.  The top ten were identified for some weird reason I never knew.

[Caracal]

Not me, either.  My high school did not rank people.  We had no valedictorian.

That said, I had the third-highest GPA in the class of about 300.  The top ten were identified for some weird reason I never knew.

I was in the 3rd quintile with a GPA in the B+ range. I got much better grades in college.