<p>So im a junior that’s facing a problem that ive noticed several others are facing as well.
Some high schools do not consider weight when they rank. As a result, a person who takes 7 AP’s and has a 3.8 GPA is of a lower rank than a person taking 7 slack off classes with a 4.0 GPA. As a result in my school, there is a five-way tie for valedictorian, two of which do not “deserve” to have this title.<br>
How can I (we) explain this situation to others without sounding like a whiner or a person who is just trying to find an excuse?</p>
<p>In some cases, it will not matter, and in others it will.</p>
<p>My Ss’ school does not weigh, either. When I asked why, I was told (correctly, it seems) that colleges recompute grades so that there is no point in the school weighting grades. Typically, colleges will disregard courses such as carpentry or phys ed. They will look at the school’s profile and take note of the classes you took. Were they the most challenging? If APs were available, did you take them? In these cases, a student who took easier courses and got a higher GPA will not necessarily be more successful than the student who took harder courses.</p>
<p>There are colleges which are stats-driven and do not recompute GPAs; these are where lack of weighting may hurt a student who took challenging classes and/or whose school has grade deflation. Finally, being val or sal may be of great help getting some scholarships, so it hurts the harder-working student when there is no weighting.</p>
<p>To sum up, it really depends where you and others will be applying. For what it’s worth, the top students in our hs had no trouble getting into Harvard, Yale, MIT and other to schools. At any rate, the school profile should explain the grading system. Your teachers’ recs and the GC’s rec will probably mention it, or at least say how good a student you are.</p>
<p>The UCs compute the GPA themselves so for them the HS GPA doesn’t matter. This levels the field between the schools that weight vs those that don’t weight and those that weight classes that the UCs wouldn’t weight. It also limits the number of ‘5’ scale classes they allow to enter the equation.</p>
<p>“How can I (we) explain this situation to others without sounding like a whiner or a person who is just trying to find an excuse?”</p>
<p>It really is so difficult to pull off that, if I were you, I wouldn’t try it until I was married and at least 40 (the same conditions that rabbis required for reading the Zohar.)</p>
<p>Local HS doesn’t weigh grades either, UW uses unweighted grades. Life isn’t fair and this will seem trivial in a few years… Don’t waste time or energy on it. BTW, my HS class never posted ranks eons ago.</p>
<p>To whom are you trying to explain it? If you’re worried about colleges, their admissions people (and scholarship committees) are in the business of reading high school transcripts, recommendations, and GC reports, and I’m sure all of them are familiar with the phenomenon you describe. They don’t have any trouble distinguishing among “deserving” and somewhat-less-deserving students.</p>
<p>If you’re worried about your parents and relatives, go ahead and whine to your heart’s content.</p>
<p>As for the rest of the world, it’s bad form to talk too much about your class rank anyway. If it were I, I would not take the risk of attempting to “explain” to anyone how some valedictorians are more unequal than others. In the spectrum of light that could cast on you, very little of it is good.</p>
<p>The only people who really need an explanation are the colleges. I’m sure it’s pretty clear in the materials that are sent to colleges that your rank is based on unweighted grades. I’d talk to your GC about your concerns. Perhaps he or she would be willing to write something like, “sriharifez’s rank doesn’t truly reflect her academic abilities. Sri has been willing to risk her standing in order to take the most challenging courses available,” maybe the GC would even be will to write something like “We don’t use weighted rank at our high school, but if we did, Sri would probably be in the top ___%.”</p>
(Why is this in the “Parent’s Cafe?”)</p>