A Washington state high school has forty-four valedictorians in this year's graduating class. Garfield High is not alone--there are a number of schools across the nation that have more than one person ranked first in the senior class, including a Fresno, CA, high school that is graduating 58 valedictorians this year. Last year Garfield graduated 30 valedictorians, and the year before that it graduated 27.

Garfield sounds like an interesting limit case for the obvious questions the numbers raise about whether the school is indulging in rampant grade inflation. The beneficiariees of a school system that tracks talented students into accelerated classes from the first grade on, Garfield's valedictorians will be taking their 4.0 GPAs to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, and UC Berkeley this fall. Nine of them will be heading to Stanford. Whether their expectation of continued top grades will translate in this sort of behavior once they find themselves surrounded by peers with similar high school records remains to be seen. For now, the only real problem is a logistical one--how do you structure a graduation ceremony where 44 students will be expected to speak? Garfield has solved the problem by making valedictory speeches optional, and by limiting each to the recitation of a quote. Thirty-five of its number ones will deliver quotes at graduation.

Should the school have made an effort to choose its valedictorian by other means--perhaps by taking extra-curricular involvement or leadership into consideration? That's risky in this legal climate.

I recall the brightest student of my 1st year class at law school having a breakdown shortly into the second final exam (and withdrawing from school). A great guy - but apparently unused to and unable to handle not bering way ahead of the rest of the pack.

The whole notion of a "valedictorian" dates back to a time of neighborhood and rural schools, where students took the same classes, got their grades and the one with the best GPA and the fewest disciplinary problems got to give a speech. It simply doesn't make sense in schools with 1000+ students per class, AP classes, community college classes and obsessive parents trying to game the system.

It's like with spelling bees. When I was a kid, you stood up there, a teacher read English words out of the dictionary and the kid who spelled the words correctly won. Today, kids are so overtrained that such a competition would be pointless, so we get the spectacle of dysfunctional homeschoolers plowing through Farsi foods and Swedish philosophies.

On gaming the system -

I remember the valedictorian at my high school was always absent on test days. I'm sure having an extra day or so at home to study for chemistry exams helped her earn high marks.

If schools published a formula where they weighted academics, athletics, and activities to identify the top student, wouldn't students try to work the formula? How would you feel as a student if you missed out on being top dog to someone with lower academic performance?

Reminds me of when my friend graduated from Mira Mesa high in 1991 (this is in San Diego). 1200 kids in the class, and 6 valedictorians.

Public school of course.

My high school, which is private, barely had 1200 in all 4 grades.

I remember the valedictorian at my high school was always absent on test days. I'm sure having an extra day or so at home to study for chemistry exams helped her earn high marks.



Ah yes.. we had a few of those. Not only do they get an extra day to study, they can ask their friends what was specifically on the test to know what to focus on. Of course we had a few teachers that saw through that and gave those that missed the original test a different one.

The person that ended up being our valedictorian (we only had 1) never pulled any of that crap. He was a good friend of mine, and just worked his butt off.

Well, coming from a public school in Ontario, the notion of even having a valedictorian selected based solely on GPA seems fairly foreign (which it technically is, I suppose). We selected our valedictorian through a grade-wide vote. It worked quite well, and the absolute best person was selected for it. He was quite a smart fellow, and had he not been involved with everything under the sun at the school, he would have had some of the best grades in the graduating class. He was involved in so much that the principal introduced him to visiting functionaries as a vice-principal, and I'm not quite sure it was jokingly, either.

So I wonder at the wisdom of the valedictorian being selected based solely on marks-- shouldn't a valedictorian represent the best a school can offer?

I've heard it suggested that high schools should give out summa, magna, and cum laudes as an alternative.

It's interesting...

My old school--a NYC private high school that is very academically rigorous--for all its fuss over college admissions and infinite degrees of participation in extra-curricular activities, never assigns class ranks, never calculates GPAs, and has valedictorians (one per graduating class) that are elected by their peers in their grade to speak at commencement. The valedictorian was not selected on the basis of grades.

Now, of course, this could simply turn into a semi-petty popularity contest some years (which happened)...but in the approximately 10 graduations I've attended there (I love my school), most valedictory speeches have been tasteful, bright, and respected.

Just another perspective...

The real question seems to me to be this: Is it possible to have a well-functioning society in which virtually every decision, by any organization, becomes grounds for litigation?

I think the answer is pretty clearly "no."

I was in the top 10% of my class, and that was good enough for me. I had a decent shot at Valedictorian, I thought, but when I was sophomore, I was turned off to the idea when a friend of mine who was going to get an A- in Chemistry started begging the teacher to allow her to clean the beakers, sweep the floors and do all the dirty work in the lab so she could get an A in the class. At that point, I decided if that's what it took, I wasn't that interested. (And I don't mean she asked him after class once or twice - her behavior boarded on stalking).

We wound up with 3 valedictorians, but they gave their speech together, framed as a sort of Socratic dialectic between the three of them.

Checking the one story -- they have some details wrong. In 2003, Sarah Bird, a senior at Plano West Senior High School, in Plano, was told that her P.E. class was half a credit hour. Without telling her, they moved it to a full credit hour, and she would have skipped credit for the class, even at an A, if it were a full hour. That change, made the difference between her being #1 and being #2. She petitioned to have the class reduced to the half hour she was told it counted for, which moved her back to #1.

The other kid was extremely ungracious. By golly, she had won by someone getting the hours bumped up without notice, so she should be able to keep the win.

Sigh.

My school used your actual class grades to compute rank. Any A was not just worth 4 points -- if you had a 96 or a 92 average in the class, that's what they used. Advanced courses were not given any special consideration. Gym did not count (a blessing).

Despite this scheme, to *four* decimal places, we had two valedictorians and two salutatorians out of 300 students.

Three of the four took mostly advanced courses, although none of us had more than two courses in common beyond the ten or so basic required courses over four years. We thought that was pretty interesting at the time.