The school district from which my kids graduated named everyone in the class at each HS who had over a 4.0 average a Valedictorian. The student who had the absolute highest GPA graduated #1 and was named the Scholar of Scholar. That student would graduate first in the class. The Valedictorians would all graduated in alphabetical order followed by the rest of the student body. All Valedictorians wore white gowns while the rest of the student bodies wore the main color for their HS (in my kids' case-- blue).

DaffyKD

So why not just recognize the students who earned a 4.0, and honor that one top student as valedictorian?

Again, this is why being named valedictorian will lose all meaning.

According to the free dictionary:

val·e·dic·to·ri·an (vl-dk-tôr-n, -tr-)
n.
The student with the highest academic rank in a class who delivers the valedictory at graduation.


The schools calling everybody with over a 4.0 a valedictorian need a vocabulary lesson.

I do think a few students who actually did have the same GPA with the same rigor of classes could share the title. Once you get too many though, the school is better off going with the summa cum laude, magna cum laude, & cum laude system. I didn't mention that when I graduated, the class president gave the speech. Our class president was a joke of a student who was just super hot and popular. His speech reflected his attitude toward academics.

Haha.. I definitely looked up the definition, as well. "THE student" is what stood out in all sources that I found.

One thing I realized very quickly right after I graduated hs was that hs class rankings are meaningless at that point.

Grew up in a college town surrounded by farmland. I graduated from hs in the mid/late 70's, our parents were most definitely NOT part of the "everyone gets a trophy" generation. That being said, there were a few different tracks. Some kids took cosmetology, some vo/ag, some took the most rigorous courses they could, as they intended to not only get a BS, but to get a PhD. Every year there was a kerfuffle regarding valedictorian, etc. basically because there was the divide over "whoever gets the highest GPA should get valedictorian" versus "but why should a cosmetology student get valedictorian while a kid with a much more difficult coursework doesn't get it?" Nowadays, with AP courses and the like, a kid can be knocked out of contention by one tenth of a point. With 500 in a typical class in our local hs, my vote would be for recognition for anyone with a GPA over 4.0. I don't care what you call them.

And I don't know about y'all, but in some ways my kids worked harder in high school than I ever did-5 AP courses each (we didn't have those), reading books in 8th grade that I read in 11th grade, and taking algebra in 8th grade. Now I will say that the area that I was ahead of my kids was the ability to write research papers. But then again, we had very little creative writing (thank goodness, how I hated that, but that's me), while my kids had quite a bit of it, while the kind of writing they would need in the real world and college was not emphasized as much.

Totally this at my HS - there was lots of anger that Vo-Tech kids could get into National Honor Society. Those kids should be able to say "I was 16th in a class of 100" and also "among students in the college preparatory course of study, I was 2nd out of 50."

If that many kids are getting 4.0s, then just let the class president give the speech and be done with it. I've heard some really effing boring valedictorian speeches.

My high school went from a val/sal system to a "distinguished senior scholar" of the top 1% (500ish graduates each year) about 5 years after I graduated. One of the reasons (so I hear), was because there were students who would take 6-8 academic classes, mix of AP (5.0) and standard (4.0) classes - however there would also be students who only took 4-6 academic classes + 2 "non-graded" classes (such as cheer leading, monitor, study hall, etc). Those only taking 4ish academic classes (in AP classes) would end up with higher GPAs, even though they took fewer academic classes. I tended to think that they just new the system and worked it - but there were finally a bunch of helicopter parents with influence who changed the system :)

While looking at the course schedule for information for my kids, I see that each student is only allowed to take 1 non-graded class now. Probably a better idea.

Try thousandths of a point. I graduated 15 years ago from a hypercompetitive school and our designations were pretty tight.

I graduated from HS 15 years ago.

Our GPA was calculated according to letter grades (A= 4.0; A- = 3.7, etc.), however, we could get a GPA boost for Honors (A= 4.5; A- = 4.2, etc.) or AP (A= 5.0; A- = 4.7, etc.) courses. So yes, the harder your classes were, the more weight it counted for in your GPA. That was done to reward people for taking harder courses and not have a valedictorian who had the highest GPA but not have the academic rigor of a student who may have taken all AP classes senior year.

But in terms of class rank, you could only have 1 student in each slot. Although my class was large (686 students) it was highly competitive. In order to achieve the 'one kid in a slot' rank, our GPAs were calculated to the 1000th point. (For frame of reference, I graduated with a 4.184). If there were any 'ties' the tie-breaker was done based on the # of harder courses you took. In general, there were no ties, at least towards the top of the class. I did get annoyed that the girl just above me in the class beat me out by .001 of a point, but I took more honors and AP classes than she did (she just got As where I may have gotten an A- or B+ that pulled me down a little).

Apparently, one year, valedictorian came down to the fact that one kid had taken Honors Gym (yes, we had Honors gym--harder courses e.g. dance or being a PE ass't for freshman/sophomore gym. Honors gym was only available to juniors and seniors) and the salutatorian had not. As someone who took Honors dance for gym--it wasn't easy--I can see where the salutatorian would've been pissed that year but the other person had to have worked hard to get an A.

It is my understanding that my HS still does things this way, but they are looking into changing it as we seem to be an island amongst our HS neighbors; most of whom no longer report rank. This was taken from a forum about that issue:
"In the Class of 2012, there was a .096 difference in grade point average between students ranked 5 and 25. There was a 0.689 difference in grade point average between students ranked 50-100."

And as a side note--I was particularly proud of the women in my HS class. One one member of the top 10 in my class was male (and he was #10).

I have a friend who went to another HS in my state and he was 1 of 5 valedictorians. He was miffed that he took a harder course load than any of the others but they were rewarded the same way.

My school was the exact same way. What blew me away was that my GPA (which was in the 3.0 range) in Plano put me in the 52nd percentile (which looked terrible to colleges) but that same GPA in Southfield would have put me in the top 20%.

Hell, I didn't care while I was in high school lol

Most of the people at the top of my class were more concerned about being in the top 10% -- didn't matter where you fell, as long as you were included in that group (due to the Texas automatic admission thing).