<p>^
But most of them would be able to show their outstanding-ness in other ways, wouldn’t they? (Barring socioeconomic difficulties.)
For example, even though GPA is inflated, most people still do badly on standardized tests (which are flawed, but say if they weren’t).</p>
<p>Yeah, this is just dumb.</p>
<p>A private highschool near me does this:
only students taking the college prep or honors program are elligable to be val or sal. They do not weight. If there is a tie the student with the Highest ACT score is val. If there is a tie with 3 or less they are all vals. If there is more than 3, The student with the best non academic school record is chosen</p>
<p>One advantage of grading on a 100 pt. scale is that you never have ties. We weight AP classes for class rank only. Works very well.</p>
<p>My school had three this year. Given that the graduating class is no more than 73 people and the fact that valedictorian here is NOT decided on grades (too close to call, really) I found it quite silly.</p>
<p>Welcome to the 21st century, where everybody is a winner and there is no incentive to be better than the rest and achieve more.</p>
<p>The same thing happens with little league sports teams - nobody wins, everybody gets an award for participation. I know damn well someone is better than the rest and he/she needs to be recognized.</p>
<p>I just graduated yesterday, and out of 373 students, 15 were valedictorians, and 1 was a salutatorian. As a valedictorian, I would have almost preferred to have been salutatorian since that was more unique. However, they did end up ranking us in a way since only the top 4 students at our school get the Wisconsin Academic Excellence Scholarship, though they only said who were the top four (myself included). </p>
<p>Many of the valedictorians had taken a rigorous course load (many had taken at least 6 AP courses), but it shows that grade inflation is huge at my school if that many people can get straight As in AP classes. The other local high school only had 2 or 3 valedictorians, so I don’t know what’s different…</p>
<p>My school has a ton of grade inflation but we still only have one valedictorian because of arbitrary tie-breaking. I think they resolve ties by ranking the people in alphabetical order. I don’t think that’s any better. It’s not the 29 valedictorians that is the problem, it’s the underlying system that allows that kind of tie to happen.</p>
<p>On the bright side of this topic…</p>
<p>oh wait. </p>
<p>There isnt</p>
<p>And in today’s news headline…“There are 5 winners of this years Kentucky Derby. Red Rose stocks rise 50%”!</p>
<p>Ditto SeekingUni</p>
<p>Ye ask and ye will receive… back when I graduated 20some years ago, back in the days before weighted grades, I WORKED in high school and finished with about a 3.7. There was 1 student in my highly competitive, college prep, suburban school that got a 4.0 out of a class of nearly 700 students… 1, just 1, with a 4.0. That same school today, probably has several hundred that finish with greater than a 4.0… </p>
<p>It got to the point that parents were upset and complaining because their perfect angels didn’t get A+ on those essays with such subjective grading or when the multiple choice questions were in any way ambiguous, and teachers and schools caved and now students don’t have to achieve much to earn an A…and if they don’t achieve that much, well there’s always abundant extra credit…</p>
<p>At my Ss small HS there were only 10 students in his AP calculus class. All were TOP students. All passed the class. When they took the AP test, 3 of them scored a 4 or greater (my son got a 4). The other 7 got 1s or 2s??? Even the salutatorian of his class, who most likely got an A in the course, got a 2 on the AP exam??? What does that say about what they actually LEARNED in the class and the actual meaning of the grades they received??? </p>
<p>But it’s not just HSs…at my son’s college 20% of the students make the Dean’s list with a 3.5 or higher… in the MBA program I just completed the school’s official grading scale is the top 10-20% of students get As (regardless of percentage or performance), the next 60-70% get Bs, the bottom 10-20% get Cs and Ds and Fs are reserved for special circumstances…</p>
<p>Why have grades at all if they don’t mean anything?</p>
<p>I agree with csdad–we grade on an old school numerical scale and rounding is done to a the nearest 100th for purposes of ranking. I suppose if there ever was a tie they could take it out farther. Plus, a 95 average and a 100 average in a class are hardly the same and they should not be treated as such!</p>
<p>“Plus, a 95 average and a 100 average in a class are hardly the same”</p>
<p>IMO, if it’s even possible for someone (other than a very extreme student every ten years or so :D) to get a 100 in a class, the class needs to be made more difficult. </p>
<p>I don’t like the hair-splitting in a 100-point scale. It doesn’t actually help with grade inflation, it just makes it more easy to tell who really has the highest inflated GPA. Whatever the solution is, it’s probably not a scale change. </p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense to compare a GPA on a 4.0 scale to a GPA on a different (weighted) scale. Just because someone has a GPA higher than 4.0 doesn’t necessarily mean there’s grade inflation (though there usually is), it just means the scale has been changed.</p>
<p>While we’re at it, why not eliminate grades and transcripts and instead give students portfolios of all the work they did in school, with attendance sheets, annotated test Q&As, annotated papers, homework, etc.? That would put the entire responsibility of student evaluation into the hands of the person who wants to learn about the student.</p>
<p>“IMO, if it’s even possible for someone (other than a very extreme student every ten years or so ) to get a 100 in a class, the class needs to be made more difficult.”</p>
<p>No sure about that since kids are getting perfect SAT scores…perhaps its time that got harder too?</p>
<p>My point was that 100s ARE elusive and an A based on a grade range is certainly not as discriminating as the actual numerical grade in differentiating rank.</p>
<p>As a side note on grade inflation, when I was in school the Val and Sal had 95 something averages…I barely had a 90 and managed to get into a highly selective university…by today’s standards I would have been relegated to community college!</p>
<p>“No sure about that since kids are getting perfect SAT scores”</p>
<p>Not a lot of kids, though. And it’s different because the SAT is curved and high school grades usually aren’t. (And when people get 100s in classes it’s often because of extra credit, not because they actually got every possible point on every assignment.)</p>
<p>I don’t think counting a 95 as different from a 100 would really change anything, though. It would just show you who had the highest inflated grade, which to me doesn’t say very much about the person’s aptitude for the subject in question or how well they’d perform in a class without inflation. And the difference between a 95 and a 100 can be pretty minimal, especially if there weren’t many assignments.</p>
<p>“While we’re at it, why not eliminate grades and transcripts and instead give students portfolios of all the work they did in school, with attendance sheets, annotated test Q&As, annotated papers, homework, etc.?”</p>
<p>Schools would probably have to change the nature of some of their assignments and tests to make them more about insight/research/creativity than rote memorization, which would probably be a good thing if it were done well. This would be a lot of work for colleges, though, and they probably don’t want that.</p>
<p>The solution to grade inflation is easy. In Alberta, we had a 3 hour standardized final exam in every subject. Our grade on that exam accounted for 50% of the course grade. The province curved exam averages to around 65%. If you were to get over 90% on one of the exams, you would likely be in the top 5%. Bye-bye grade inflation.</p>
<p>This isn’t really surprising, considering how there have even been schools where more than forty students graduate valedictorian per year, especially with the sheer amount of grade inflation in high schools these days. Though it’s no wonder that so many kids with stratospheric GPAs are being rejected by their safety nowadays.</p>
<p>@muaythaiguy18:
Somehow I doubt that most Americans would accept this. Standardized testing is already a topic under intense fire in America, so basing half of a kid’s grade on a standardized test will really not roll well here.</p>
<p>I support standardized tests on some level but I don’t think they should be used exclusively, especially for subjects with a lot of concepts you can easily memorize without actually understanding.
A lot of people in my school don’t write very well (including me, probably) and I think we should have to write more papers, much as I hate it. And we should do more projects that require creativity/insight.
(Difficult projects, not just a glue-sequins-on-a-poster-board kind of thing. Something like the investigative labs in AP Bio where we had to design our own experiments to determine something.)</p>
<p>Everyone blames the high GPAs nowadays to grade inflation. Grade inflation, grade inflation, grade inflation. When you say, I got a 100 in AP Calculus, the response is usually a harsh yell of “grade inflation.”</p>
<p>No one ever blames khanacademy. No one ever blames patrickjmt. No one ever blames quizlet. No one ever blames the Cliffnotes or Sparknotes. No one ever blames Evernote. No one ever blames Google and Google Docs and Wikipedia and Dictionary.com and Investopedia. No one ever blames improved libraries, improved study techniques, and improved teaching methods over the past 50 years.</p>
<p>No one ever blames better classroom materials. No one ever blames the books with colorful graphics, conveying the most difficult concepts of thermodynamics in half a page more easily than those textbooks 50 years ago did with 5 walls of text. No one ever blames the touch of compassion teachers have for students who need just half a percent for an A.</p>
<p>Instead, everyone blames grade inflation. I do agree that sometimes letting 50 people out of a class of 1000 be valedictorians is absurd. I also agree that some classes truly are excessively easy, in which people who get an A in the class fail the AP exam. But if the average GPA is 3.3 as opposed to 2.0, grade inflation and easy classes are not totally to blame.</p>
<p>Reports of grade-inflation are greatly exaggerated and fear-mongering. Almost no school in the world lets everyone get a 4.0. The fact that valedictorians are rejected from top universities can be explained by the smarter applicant pool. When everyone uses khanacademy, it’s harder to be the smartest among everyone. </p>
<p>Grade curve is and absolutely horrific task. It is like a caste system. When everyone is content with their Cs and Ds, it works out fine. But when everyone feels a sudden urge to get an A, the entire system goes crashing down to the ground. This is counterbalanced due to the huge number of test-takers in regional and national tests. But on a classroom-wide and school-wide basis, no one is content with a C or a D, especially when Finals come.</p>
<p>Numerical grades such as 95 and 100 are similarly awful. Doing numerical grades encourages luck. It may not be fair if the top student in a class can only receive a 95, while in the same class with a different teacher a slacker can receive a 100. Of course, this can still happen with GPA, but most of the time teachers are obligated to give out at least one 4 or they look extremely difficult, but with numerical grades teachers are encouraged and competing to give out higher and higher 90s grades to make their students look good.</p>