It’s commencement time in Lake Wobegon
With sports entering its last lap, it’s refreshing to focus on the primary mission of secondary schools — education.
Isn’t it great to see so many schools honoring multiple students as valedictorians?
Or is it?
Last week, Abilene announced that in coming years, one and only one student will be honored as valedictorian. The second best student will be the one and only salutatorian.
It may sound like a fuddy-duddy, stickler rule written by Miss Thistlebottom, but there’s a reason for not declaring more than one valedictorian, particularly in smaller districts.
Students and parents obsess over grade-point averages and scores on standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, but most universities don’t pay attention to them.
Many high schools, especially in suburbs, have started playing around with GPAs, granting extra grade points for college-level courses taken in high school. While 4.00 is supposed to represent perfection — straight A’s all through school — some schools report GPAs much higher, often as high as 5.00 or even 6.00. That makes GPAs irrelevant as absolute measures.
Likewise, research has confirmed that scores on tests like the ACT and SAT do not indicate much of anything other than whether a student knows — or has paid to learn —secrets about acing standardized tests.
What really predicts a student’s success in college is, unsurprisingly, how well the student did relative to other students in high school.
The most commonly used measure of that is percentile class rank — the percentage of students who had GPAs lower than the student’s.
In a class of 100, if you have the highest score, you rank in the 99th percentile, meaning 99% of students scored lower than you did.
But if you and nine other students tie for valedictorian, only 89% scored lower than you, so you’re in the 89th percentile.
Top colleges often target students in the 95th percentile or higher. You could, therefore, be co-valedictorian and not qualify for admission or, more important, a scholarship.
If your school had named only one valedictorian and one salutatorian, both of them plus two others might qualify in the 95th percentile. Sharing honors, however, might lead to all 10 being disqualified.
The problem becomes more pronounced in smaller schools. If you’re the only valedictorian in a class of 20 students, you would be in the 95th percentile. With two valedictorians, you’d be in the 90th percentile.
Colleges could apply common sense and detect such problems, but in popular fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, the number of applicants makes this impractical, and the bias of those evaluating applicants is to rely on cold, hard, computer-generated numbers.
Abilene is phasing in the change to just one valedictorian to give teachers time to adjust grading scales so they more finely distinguish who are the absolute best students.
In recent years, grades have been subject to massive inflation. Honor rolls used to be limited to the top 20%. Nowadays, 75% of a class might end up on an honor roll.
People outside education often get confused about what constitutes truly high-level achievement. You’ll hear someone brag, for example, about a student earning a 3.25 GPA without understanding that the average GPA at the student’s school is something like 3.43. Rather than being a top student, the student is actually below average.
We like to believe, as Garrison Keillor said about his mythical hometown of Lake Wobegon, that all our children are above average. But, of course, they can’t be. Only half can be above average. The other half has to be below.
Rewarding what essentially is mediocrity might please parents, but it hurts students who truly are exceptional. If honors are given to more than the most honorable, they lose their honor.
— ERIC MEYER