Tulane EA app is due today… will D get it in? It’s anyone’s guess. This has been her first choice in theory but she has serious application weariness & with some acceptances under her belt she is losing steam. Plus, in order to attend Tulane she will have to complete the project/essay & nab one of the FT scholarships so this is not even the finish line for Tulane.
@suzy100 , same here. D’s school does not rank but does select Val/Sal towards the end of the year. D never wanted to pursue Val/Sal bc she wanted to take unweighted courses in things she liked, such as Art. She says she wouldn’t want to make a speech at graduation. But now that senior year is here and she has done so well, I do wonder if she has any pangs of regret for more or less taking herself out of the game with the classes she chose.
I have no idea how it would have turned out but I did worry a little last night that if a college requested her rank from her GC (which GC said can be calculated if requested) it could hurt her in that way. :-S Part of me wants GC to let us know if any school requests it, especially ED school. Would GC explain that D chose to take unweighted Art or ceramics every year bc she enjoys it and Intro Psych bc they didn’t offer Honors? I doubt it, so hopefully these decisions weren’t harmful in a competitive private school. 
What if she isn’t even ranked top 10% with her UW 4.0 and grade-skipping in math, science and foreign language? She does have mostly Hon and AP courses (including four AP classes this year), but she also once again took unweighted (World Religions) bc she was interested in it.
Good luck to all who may reach that decorated accomplishment! 
@DiotimaDM , our kid wears 30x33 and he has only a single pair of jeans in this size which we found at walmart about an year ago. Just waiting to see him grow that one inch but looks like he has hit his limits.
I sounds crazy, but looking at my D’s HS transcript, she was already out of the Val/Sal race all the way back in the 8th grade when she got B’s in biology & geometry honors both of which followed her over to high school.
Congrats to those kids that kept pace all the way through & are in the running for those prestigious designations!!!
My daughter isn’t in the running but she’s hovered around 5th in her class for all four years. It’s crazy because the difference between #1-10 is so minute in terms of GPA. Its just so hard to overtake anyone by Junior year… She was never in the running and doesn’t seem upset. They offer all students a chance to submit a speech as The Voice of their class and she may do that. In doing so they have Sal/Val/class voice all speak at graduation. It’s kind of a cool opportunity.
We got some jeans from AEO. They have skinny, slim, slim straight and straight. I think waist 28 and 29 go to 34 inseam, and waist 30 to 36 inseam. They are pricey but they have sales sometimes and we get coupons with their rewards program. They have buy one, get 50% off another sale now.
S wants to get to 130 lbs so he can donate blood, he is an universal donor.
No class ranking here and no weighting of honors or IB courses. They switched a couple years ago to a cum laude system so the kids wouldn’t be so pressured. The senior class picks its own speaker at graduation which is nice. 3.5-3.74 is cum laude, 3.75-3.89 is magna cum laude, and 3.9-4.0 is summa cum laude.
@LMHS73 yup, here it isn’t even the grades, it’s the classes you take in middle school, you can have a perfect GPA but if you didn’t start taking your forgein languages classes in middle school there is no way you can have enough weighted classes to compete. Since we homeschooled until 9th grade I never gave this a thought. I’ve since learned that around here kids/parents plan out high school courses in 6th grade!
We don’t have Val/Sal, but senior rank and weighted GPA for latin honors are determined after the third quarter.
My daughter was never in the running for val/sal and, like said above, lost the race going into 8th grade based on the different honors offerings of the town’s three middle schools. Her rank is respectable, but not top 10.
We have a county high school that consistently has 15 or 16 valedictorians each year - they go by straight GPA no matter the difficulty of the class, so the title is pretty meaningless.
D has a 4.0 UW with 11 APs, and she isn’t even in the top 10%. The price of playing a sport. SURELY college AOs take those things into consideration?
S is 6’2" and 140 lbs. Instead of dreading the freshman 15, I’m hoping he puts it on! He wore 28s for the longest time, and the main reason he went to 30s was because we could never find the 34 inseam in 28s.
Once he’s done with the winter show, he going to do Krav Maga with his dad and get some weight training pointers from my brother. Those ambulance stretchers aren’t light even when they’re empty, and he needs more upper body strength before he takes the rest of his EMT training.
Wrangler sells way more waist/inseam combos than any brand I’ve seen, so if Costco doesn’t have the size you need, look for Wranglers on Amazon or someplace like Boot Barn.
Re: Val/sal - S got a single B+ in one semester of 9th grade A Capella, so that took him permanently out of the race for class rank. He’s usually somewhere around 15-17 out of 625 students, and he’s cool with that. National Merit was the thing he wanted, so that’s where he directed his focus.
Our school determines Val/Sal after spring finals, so days before graduation. Last year our #1 and #2 were so close and they messed up! One student was named Val and was honored as such during graduation, but a week or two later there was a small article in the local newspaper with a correction, #2 was actually Val and #1 was actually Sal. Not sure how that could have happened but that had to be awful for the two students who happen to be friends.
My DS is currently #4 and from what I’ve heard, #2-10 are literally tenths or hundredths of a point apart so it could change by graduation. I believe #1 has been ranked as such since freshman year and according to DS, he is not involved in any EC, but studies long hours to get 100s in everything. DS actually would be happy to stay where he is…top 1% and he does not wish to speak at graduation, in fact I think he would be mortified to speak in front of thousands of people.
@Mom2con hope it works out, especially because of the vengeance of the #2 girl. I would think if the criteria is not listed in the handbook, the GC would be able to tell you.
Does anyone know what time SAT results are released online? I’ve read conflicting info.
Also, for those familiar with IDOCs from CSS Profile: Do you need to upload your documents separately for each college or are they corralled in the one area after uploading? My IDOCs portal indicates that X school would like the following documents, but I received an email saying that a different school (ED school) was requesting documents (though that doesn’t show up the same on the IDOCs portal). I did upload the requested documents for ED school on 11/11 and they still show as being under review. Not sure if I need to upload again for the other schools.
Because Texas public universities have the option to provide a scholarship for the highest ranking graduate, the Texas Education Agency limits that designation to one person, although in the case of an exact tie they allow the highest ranking graduate certificate to be awarded to no more than two people in a high school. I’m sure there are high schools in Texas that give the valedictorian title to multiple students, but they must get down to the single highest ranked student in order to award that certificate that will lead to a scholarship. S’s school has just one val and one sal.
S was also never in the running for val or sal. He was #5 after junior year, although he’s taking a level art class this year so I expect his rank to drop a few spots before the final ranking. He knows for sure that #1-3 placed into AP foreign language freshman year, while he had to take level introductory foreign language. He’s not sure who #4 is so doesn’t know what courses that person took. S will end up with 13 APs and two dual credit classes (AP and DC get the same GPA boost), eight pre-AP (also given a GPA boost), and five level classes. The val will graduate with three more AP classes than S. There was never a chance that S could catch up on AP count, and the top students never broke their straight-A streaks. I’d guess the top 20-30 students in the class all have unweighted 4.0 and are only separated by number of AP classes.
DD and I visited UAH last week - must say, we were both very pleasantly surprised. She really liked the campus, the student ambassadors and the “feel” of the school. We met with the Dean of the Honors College as she was accepted as well as the Dean of the College of Education and a few folks from the Physics dept. (She is undecided)
The dorms are amazing with lots of privacy as well as a nice selection of dining options that are reasonably priced.
I put up the housing deposit and bought shirts for DH and I, she is planning on attending UAH.
That only took two years, Yay, yay, yay!!!
Go Chargers!
=D>
Our school locks in val/sal and graduation honors for the actual graduation ceremony at the end of first semester. The actual notification is usually somewhere at the end of January. The official ranking of course occurs at the end of the school year and that is the one that matters for the $$$ as Traveler98 mentioned.
Last I heard DD will graduate magna cum laude with distinguished achievement, which used to garner a special medal to wear at graduation, but they did away with the medal last year because those who did not earn it felt left out. Distinguished achievement was earned by having a certain gpa plus getting a certain score on the ACT/SAT/PSAT or earning a 3 or better on 3 or more AP exams. Now distinguished achievement criteria has been lowered and lots of kids will be earning it, it’s not particularly “distinguished” anymore. I can’t even imagine the stress of vying for val/sal!
Speaking of grades, I don’t know if it is because the pressure is off because she has submitted all of her college apps or what, but DD currently has the best grades she has ever had. I want to kiss her and shake her at the same time…“girlfriend where were these grades last year when they actually counted?!” I will be interested to see where her class rank shakes out in January, but I doubt it will amount to much of a change or at least not enough to move up the 25 spots to hit top 10%, which is all that really matters here in TX. (Although she tells me that many of her peers are struggling with their AP Gov and AP Econ classes, which she knocked out over the summer, so maybe some of them will go down a bit in rank) She has 12 honor/pre-ap classes plus 9 APs. She is pretty much a mid-B student in her weighted classes and an A+ student in her unweighted classes. Hindsight tells me we should have not had her take all of the honor/AP classes and she probably would have been able to slide into the top 10% for auto admit, but I try to console myself by saying she at least will be prepared for the course rigor in college.
The MC portion of the November 4th test results will be released as early as 11/17 thru 11/23. If the essay was also taken, then the essay portion may be released anywhere between 11/17 thru 11/28.
@3scoutsmom Yes, we lock in after 2nd mp (1st semester) - I was just asking when other schools lock in, to see if others were in this same position.
@AmyBeth68 I love that your school does that with the speech - honestly, that’s all my son cares about. He actually wants to make a speech. He is Student congress pres so even if for some reason he did not get Val or Sal, he would still speak and he’s be happy with that.
I honestly think it’s a little crazy how our school does the weighted courses/gpa etc. I know at the end of junior year he had a 5.8xx as his weighted gpa. That doesn’t even make sense. It should all be on the same scale.
But it’s really interesting to hear how it’s all done so differently. I actually hate being in this race - I’m proud of him, but I hate that this is what I stress about because at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. But after 3 years… it would just kind of suck. More I hate that people (even his GC) refer to him as the Val - that will make us all feel worse if it doesn’t happen… If he did get it, he would be the first non-STEM student to get it since they started the STEM program, as I think they get a gpa boost for being in STEM. But that part I’m not really sure about.
Our HS locks in 6 weeks before graduation. There is only one Val. Only core courses count, so no penalty for art but big hit for a non honors course. It’s impossible to be val/sal without starting advanced math and foreign language in jr. high. On the other hand, it is a small school, only three real contenders, they’ve been locked in at 1,2,3 since freshman year.