The class rank quagmire has led many private schools to abandon rankings, which means no valedictorian and salutatorian are named.
Perhaps, public schools should follow suit.
The status of being No. 1 in a high school graduating class can bring scholarships, including the Zell Miller and automatic admission to the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech.
But is the rank worth the rancor?
Lakeside High School is the latest flashpoint in the often-confusing process by which top slots are decided. The process has become even trickier with more high school students taking classes at local colleges as Georgia pushes dual enrollment. I covered similar valedictorian skirmishes in Cherokee County and Gainesville.
Calculating the No. 1 and 2 graduates in a senior class was straightforward when all students took the same college prep courses at the same time. Now, however, students collect high school credits in middle school, online and through dual enrollment. Schools may add GPA points for grades in classes deemed more rigorous and challenging, such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate.
So, it demands more than a calculator to figure out who deserves the No. 1 crown. It might take an audit, spread sheets and policy judgments.
And those judgments can generate outrage.
For example, Etowah High School’s valedictorian in 2011 never attended the school. She enrolled at Etowah in name only to access an early-college option offered to public school students at the University of West Georgia. Because college grades earn higher points on the GPA in Cherokee County, the dual enrolled student edged out a straight-A Etowah student, leading to protests by classmates. The resolution was a policy change to permit two valedictorians.
Gainesville City Schools consulted an outside expert – a college professor -- to help it sort out which student merited the top slot. Gainesville High had two students vying for the No. 1 slot. One student had 36 credit units and all A's. The other had 31.5 credits and a single B.
The second student ended up with the higher GPA by less than one-hundredth of a point. Why? Because the first student had high school credits from middle school, and those grades were not weighted. The other student had taken more weighted classes while in high school.
The AJC’s Marlon Walker wrote this weekend about the Lakeside High valedictorian, a dual enrolled student who is not attending tomorrow’s graduation ceremony. Some Lakeside seniors in the running for the honor were shocked when the school announced the valedictorian. None of the top students ever heard of the person.
As Walker reported:
Lakeside High School's valedictorian won't be giving a speech during Tuesday's commencement ceremony at the Georgia World Congress Center. In fact, Neha Sehgal won't even be there, organizers said. Neha technically is the school's top student, but she never took classes at the school. She is taking dual-enrollment courses full-time at a college in Gwinnett County.
Last year, legislators amended state law to make more students eligible to compete for a class' top spot, which likely helped Neha earn the distinction. The change in the law is meant to include students who sought to take advantage of dual-enrollment opportunities through the state's "Move on When Ready" program and earn college credit while still in high school, said state Rep. Robert Dickey, R-Musella.
"High schools receive all of the state funding for them, and they are part of that school, even though they may take a lot of their courses in dual enrollment," he said. "I understand the concerns, but I just don't think at the end of the day we need to be excluding these young people ... just for trying to get ahead."
In reporting on the class rank debate, top students told me their dual enrollment college courses, for which they earned higher points toward their GPAs, were not as tough as the AP classes at their home high schools. They complained that students at the top of their class for their entire high school careers were being passed over for valedictorian or salutatorian by someone with more dual enrollment classes. Students were able to get credit per semester for a college course, but many AP classes only give credit for the full school year. So, a high school senior getting an A in five yearlong year AP classes could be surpassed in class rank by a dual enrollment student taking five colleges classes each semester even with some Bs.
In an essay for the AJC, a valedictorian wrote: “For the average 'smart kid', entry-level college courses are not challenging. When compared to AP classes, they are even more laughable. My calculus exams at college were composed of homework problems verbatim, so if I did my homework the weeks leading up to an exam, all I had to do was re-work them to get an easy A on my exam. My business law class allowed us to bring legal sized cheat sheets to every exam. I skipped an entire week of lectures right before an exam to go skiing and still managed to come back and get an A on the exam. My political science exams offered at least 25 bonus points on every test and the questions came straight from the book. Is this what AP classes are like? Certainly not. I took some AP classes before deciding to joint enroll. They are incredibly difficult, and it would be highly unlikely that anyone would get a 100 in them.”
Brian Eufinger, owner of the test prep company Edison Prep, said, "I hear this paraphrased on a weekly basis from kids: 'Why would I get my butt kicked in APUSH at my high school when I could whoop up not even trying in a dual enrollment history class?'"
The Legislature ignored testimony of teachers last year that AP and IB high school courses often demand more of students than entry-level college classes, passing a law that states:
No local school system that receives funding under this article shall exclude eligible high school students taking one or more dual credit courses pursuant to this Code section from eligibility determinations for valedictorian and salutatorian of a participating eligible high school; provided, however, that this shall not apply to a high school student who moves into the local school system after his or her sophomore year and has not taken any courses on site at the participating eligible high school.
But, then again, some academics contend AP courses are not the equivalent to the college-level courses. “Before teaching in a high school, I taught for almost 25 years at the college level, and almost every one of those years my responsibilities included some equivalent of an introductory American government course. The high-school AP course didn't begin to hold a candle to any of my college courses,” said a professor-turned-high-school teacher
During the Gainesville valedictorian flare-up, then Superintendent Merrianne Dyer told me public schools should consider the Latin honors system favored by private schools and colleges, in which students earn levels of distinction such as cum laude, magna and summa cum laude.
“For the last 10 years, each year, except one, there has been contention around the valedictorian because students came to their senior year with quite a different number of course credits," Dyer said. "The cum laude system would not be dependent on everyone having the same number of course and it would recognize all the students who worked hard to get their GPAs that high."
Eufinger said, “Dual enrollment is an absolute godsend and amazing resource for students who are zoned for schools that are not able to offer very many APs, but at some of the most competitive public schools, some students utilize it as an alternative to more difficult classes on their home campus. From a societal standpoint dual enrollment is great because it helps the former group, but the admissions officers at various universities are aware of the behavior of the latter group. “
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