Won't be valevictorian

[63dot]

personally I like the 100 point scale system being used in high school. Namely because if you only use the 4.0 system it states making class rank much more difficult to do because there will be quite a few 4.0 students.
Plus it is not hard for people to understand a 100 point scale.

Either way I do think grad inflation is getting out of hand.

that's the way my law school is and since they grade similar to the bar, graduating above an 80 is great

heck, the california bar is going to grade you that harshly on the bar exam

...and what of the sat? i guess in my day, a 1200 was great and when i later saw people getting scores higher and higher, i became suspect of the test itself

 

[wordmunger]

there should be NO weighted grades

A=4.0
B=3.0
C=2.0
D=1.0
F=0

i graduated valedictorian in hs with a 4.0 gpa with tons of ap classes and classes from college while in hs

college does not have weighted grades so people need to get used to it
btw, i graduated summa cum laude with a 3.96gpa in mechanical engineering

gpa in itself doesnt mean ****, all it does is reflect your determination to do well in school


when i see gpa's over 4, i think its stupid. i mean having a 4.0 base means straight a's to have a 4.0. haveing a greater than 4.0 means that you could still get a b and have over a 4.0.....completly defeating the concept i believe

Eh... Doesn't matter that much. In my HS (many moons ago) they didn't weight and our valedictorian ended up being this guy who took NO honors or AP courses -- he didn't want to mess up his GPA. To avoid this, it makes sense to me to give an incentive to take honors / AP.

Colleges, of course, see through this and recalculate to fit their needs. But they don't necessarily recalculate to a 4.0 scale either -- they just want to make sure they've got the ability to compare students between high schools, whether the max GPA is 5, 6, or 157.

 

[63dot]

In my HS (many moons ago) they didn't weight and our valedictorian ended up being this guy who took NO honors or AP courses -- he didn't want to mess up his GPA.

do you really think that happens that much?

if someone gets that many high grades, the chance is that they will want to take some advanced courses, don't you think

i mean, how many classes in hs are complete, instant, easy A's?

i also went to hs many moons ago and the top ten students of our class of a couple hundred all took every advanced class that the school offered

 

[jeremy.king]

i can actually look back now and laugh at my rank because i just finished up my mathematics and statistics degrees from penn state main

If you ranked second to LAST, how did you get into Penn State?

My thoughts are who cares, the scholarship is most likely to a state school and someone ranking that high (with a perfect ACT score too) can choose from any university in the country...No sweat off her back - she does still get the "Valedictorian – Three-Year." resume fodder. Saves her some work on giving a speech to all the classmates who have defended her position

 

[wordmunger]

do you really think that happens that much?

I think my example might be extreme, but a student who's exceptional in math and science might decide to drop out of the honors track in English, for example. If she gets a bonus for enrolling, then even if she ends up with a B in honors English, she's not penalized.

Of course, then you end up with the reverse problem, with students not willing to take Band or Newspaper Staff because "only" getting a 4.0 in that class will pull their GPAs down.

But like I said, students who don't take the classes they're interested in in order to boost their GPAs are only hurting themselves because colleges see right through it.

 

[ham_man]

No offense, but that's a terrible analogy, and as a student, you ought to know better.

What a 6.0 does for honors classes is give more consideration to the summit (for example) than to the foot or vice versa.

A 5.0 for AP classes still reflects additional effort and intelligence without skewing the GPA. The more grade units you give to an AP class, the more you overshadow the other classes non-AP classes a student takes, which makes the average more and more an inaccurate representation of a student's "average" capabilities (which is what a GPA is meant to do).


Yes, and by giving more weight to AP classes, you distort that measure. A 5.0 for AP classes gives a modest boost to one's GPA and only minimally distorts the true accuracy of a GPA. A 6.0 can more profoundly create a false impression of how a student performs across all of his/her classes.

From an earlier post:

AP/advanced classes are 6.0 and regular classes are 5.0.