The pre-med from hell??

[the_geneticist]

I was valedictorian in high school.  Small graduating class of only 100 or so.

[marshwiggle]

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

I think ours was elected by the graduating class. But I can't remotely remember who it was 40+ years on. The GPA thing makes no sense given the range of choices students have about what courses to take.

[spork]

I will point out that the Texas high school student profiled in the original article says she will be enrolling at the College of Charleston, which is not in Texas. "'She's already going to college, she already has scholarships,' said Teresa Todd, a local government lawyer who is a longtime friend of Ms. Sullivan's mother and whose sons are close in age to Ms. Sullivan." Tuition is waived for valedictorians of Texas high schools only if they attend Texas public universities, and that scholarship exists only for the first year of college.

2021-22 tuition at UT-Austin is about $12K. Tuition at College of Charleston for out of state students appears to be $357 per credit hour, or ~ $11,000 for 30 credits. Nearly identical, and supposedly this person will be receiving scholarships if she attends CofC.

As for me, my status as a high school valedictorian had zero effect on my financial status or academic performance while in college. Nor did my undergraduate GPA have any effect on my ability to gain entry into graduate programs, because the university did not calculate GPAs (and it didn't bestow GPA-based "honors" upon graduates either).

The NYT story, if accurate, suggests a dysfunctional family.

[Caracal]

The NYT story, if accurate, suggests a dysfunctional family.

Seems like a bit of a leap.

[ergative]

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

I think ours was elected by the graduating class. But I can't remotely remember who it was 40+ years on. The GPA thing makes no sense given the range of choices students have about what courses to take.

My high school didn't weight GPA by AP classes, and I remember a couple of AP classmates and I went to complain about this. Apparently the person who was in first place our senior year didn't take any of the honours or AP classes. (I don't know how I knew this; someone asserted that it was so and I believed them.) Our counselor met with us and offered to give us the data (anonymized, I assume) so we could show whether weighting GPA differently actually mattered. She said that they (the admin) had looked at it already, and discovered that it shuffled people around in the middle but made very little difference at the top. I have no idea whether that's actually true, however, because I discovered I didn't care enough to actually do the math when push came to shove, especially back then, when I didn't know how to do even formulas in excel, let alone proper stats, and the numbers were offered as physical printouts, rather than a digital csv file. I would have had to munge the numbers by pencil and calculator.

I look back on that encounter with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I suspect that, since the person in first place didn't take AP classes, probably weighting by AP would have made a difference at least in my case. Maybe I should have pushed. On the other hand, I suspect that, from an administrator's point of view, probably the bulk of the class rank changes did happen in the middle, rather than at the top. And, as I get older, I think that the administrator was very, very canny to put the onus on me to do the work, because I took one look at those pages of printed numbers and noped out of there.

I also wonder whether, if I had done the work, they would have actually changed anything. I suspect not, so I probably saved myself a lot of heartache and disappointment by my laziness.

[lightning]

I never came close to that honor, but a close friend of mine got it.

Since graduating from high school, he/she has never once mentioned his/her valedictorian award, and we hang out together a lot.

He was not a grade grubber. He was talented, hard-working, naturally curious, and had a passion for learning. His/her valedictorian award was simply a by-product of who he/she was. There were needlessly competitive grade grubbers who lost to him/her. The whole experience taught me that if you spend too much time thinking about grades, you might forget to learn something, or worse, you might forget what it means to actually like learning.

[secundem_artem]

I do not remember who was the valedictorian at my HS.  If it's who I think it was, he's now a well placed eminence grise within the federal government as well as being a highly successful corporate lawyer.

Our college valediction was not during graduation, but during a dinner dance our class held.  The speaker was chosen by popular vote.  He has had a successful career within our profession back in his hometown.

[Chemystery]

I was fourth in my class.  A friend of mine was third.  She was very upset by this because the salutatorian had decided not to continue in the honors English track when we were sophomores.  My friend was convinced that, for this reason alone, she should be the salutatorian.  I always thought her argument strange, especially when she made it to me.  I was taking AP Calculus and she wasn't.  So depending on where those numbers would have actually landed, her argument might have actually meant that I should be salutatorian.

My high school didn't weight honors or AP classes.  I never saw a problem with that.  I figured that valuing some classes more than others would complicate things much more than she ever imagined.  Would it matter that the valedictorian, salutatorian, and I had all taken at least one high school class while we were still in middle school, while my friend hadn't?  The salutatorian had taken more than any of us.  My friend and I had both taken four years of band, which was basically a guaranteed A.  The valedictorian and salutatorian had not.  Should that count as much as other classes? 

Yes, there was scholarship money up for grab in our situation, too.  The top three students won scholarships.  I think the amount diminished with rank, but couldn't say for sure.  That was not my friend's motivation.  She was not interested in further education.  She just wanted to be salutatorian.

[apl68]

I was salutatorian out of a class of 60-odd graduates at our HS.  The ranking was based strictly on GPA, and the valedictorian edged me out.  Seemed perfectly fair to me.  The valedictorian ended up becoming our state's Education Commissioner.  The State Librarian has worked with him a good bit and has always spoken well of him. I once told her that if he failed to do right by libraries in the state she should tell me, and I would have my mother tell his mother.

It's interesting to hear about all the different ways of calculating who will be valedictorian.  I always just assumed that every school used GPA.  I can see how factors such as AP courses (There was no such thing when I was in HS) could make a difference.  Having the valedictorian elected by classmates could lead to obvious issues.  So could having a valuable state valedictorian scholarship without some pretty clear objective criteria for selecting valedictorians across the state.  Leaving it up to a local decision is just asking for trouble.

[fishbrains]

I do not remember who was the valedictorian at my HS.  If it's who I think it was, he's now a well placed eminence grise within the federal government as well as being a highly successful corporate lawyer.

I sure do remember our HS valedictorian. She was wicked smart with a great sense of biting, sarcastic humor. She was smoking hot and physically more developed than the rest of us (she actually looks like she is in her mid-20s in the yearbook photos); you couldn't help but stare at her at times because she literally glowed. And, even worse, she was the nicest person you would ever meet--as in the person who would see someone eating alone in the lunchroom and automatically go sit next to them. She remembered everyone's name, and you just felt positive around her. She wanted to be a medical missionary. I hope she made it.

Me? I was right in the middle, 52nd in a class of 104, so I didn't really feel the pressure of the competition.     

[kaysixteen]

Fishbrains, was this young woman perhaps a year or so older than the average classmate was?

[Vkw10]

I was 2nd in a class of 53, which was fine with me. Surprised my parents, because I'd won every academic award the school offered since 7th grade, and that school offered awards for everything. Valedictorian usually went to a student who took lots of home economics or P.E. classes, because a 99 average in cooking counted more than a 98 in trigonometry. Our valedictorian was a sweet, hardworking girl and her family was thrilled that she got to make the speech at graduation. I was delighted not to have to make a speech.

I might have cared more if the highest class rank had been tied to a scholarship that I needed to pay tuition.

[dr_codex]

I have no idea where I was on a ranked list. Wherever it was, it was nowhere near the top tier.

The middling sort (including me) got our Ph.D.'s; the wicked smart kids became software engineers and then senior executives at Microsoft. Or toured as professional musicians. Or started up law firms.

Even at the time, I knew that I was clever but not brilliant, in the ways that some of my classmates were (and are) brilliant. Somebody had to get the prize, but there was general recognition that there were lots of different scales by which excellence could be evaluated, and not all of them were GPA.

The difference, as many have already noted, was that a "full ride" at my alma mater in my first year cost under a grand. So, the financial stakes were much lower, even if the prestige and the status are the same.

[mamselle]

Fishbrains, was this young woman perhaps a year or so older than the average classmate was?

No, she was female!

Q.E.D.

(Just kidding)

M.

[marshwiggle]

I have no idea where I was on a ranked list. Wherever it was, it was nowhere near the top tier.

The middling sort (including me) got our Ph.D.'s; the wicked smart kids became software engineers and then senior executives at Microsoft. Or toured as professional musicians. Or started up law firms.

Even at the time, I knew that I was clever but not brilliant, in the ways that some of my classmates were (and are) brilliant. Somebody had to get the prize, but there was general recognition that there were lots of different scales by which excellence could be evaluated, and not all of them were GPA.

I remember some years back, a university with very high cutoffs studied the data and determined that   above 90% or so, there was very little correlation between first year success and incoming average. All of the students who got in were academically capable, so how well they did depended more on other factors.  A 98% average isn't guaranteed to be any better than, or even as good as, a 95% average. (And even if it doesn't include Home Ec.)