Valedictorian Thingy

The valedictorian thingy was today. Everyone was invited to go to the school board for another pointless ceremony. I went to my trumpet rehersal instead. Jon realized that life was too short, and went to see our 2nd-ranked baseball team smash some other team by a wide margin in the first round of the playoffs. Allen decided that baseball was much more fun than sitting in some silly ceremony, so he decided to play in that very game. Some others went, and others had epiphanies about the utility of time.

It wasn't so bad, apparently. Greg and Colin told me that they managed to amuse themselves by not paying attention. Apparently we were, by far, the worst-dressed and had the worst attendence out of all the schools. Greg supposedly gave an extemporaneous speech for our school. I wanted to give the speech before I realized that I wasn't going. It's not often that one has the ears of the entire school board attentively listening. I wanted to give a satirical speech, attacking them for all of their transgressions against sanity, but unfortunately they only allowed speeches that pandered to their self-promoting goals.

It raises an interesting point. Does having seventeen valedictorians--more than all they other schools, except a tie with Grant, apparently--undermine the importance of the distinction? Or maybe it's just our school's characteristic arrogance and eccentricity that led us to treat this ceremony with disdain. Or perhaps the fact that our valedictorians are overwhelmingly (relatively) skewed toward being male, makes us more carefree as a whole? All of these are probably true to some extent. It is certainly true that the quantity of valedictorians degrades the meaning of the honor, but I don't think it really matters. If seventeen students are achieving perfect grades, and all happen to be doing so in the most advanced classes, why should we seek to reduce the number by imposing additional, arbitrary requirements? The only purpose of this would be to inflate the egos of those at the very top, at the expense of those just under them. Realistically, this does not need to happen (think of me, Jon, Leeor, Maxwell, Colin, et al.).

A more substantial issue that has some bearing on this matter is the problem of grade inflation. It is true that there are more students now with outstanding grades than ever before, but in our school I question whether this is the result of an actual lowering of academic standards over time, or merely a reflection of increasing academic competition. I really have no idea whether it has become easier to get an A at Wilson over the past 50 years. With that in mind, I sincerely believe that classes could be made more difficult, particularly by tracking students more and creating more variants of humanities courses. Still, I don't think that increasing the difficulty of classes by a reasonable amount would substantially change the number of valedictorians. Most of these people would be capable of receiving straight As in high school-level courses no matter what--unless some kind of regressive grading curves were instituted.

Anyone who thinks that 17 valedictorians is problematic should travel across the hills and down the slope to Westview where there are 75 valedictorians. And no, it's not because Asians are in the majority there, at least not entirely. Even with weighted GPAs, they consider anyone with 4.0 GPA or better to be a valedictorian, meaning one can get Bs in advanced classes and still make the honor. This kind of system is ridiculous not because it honors so many students, but because it has effectively lowered the bar for valedictorianism (it was instituted just this year). As long as our standards to not degrade like they have there, I see no problem in letting more people have the honor if more people happen to do well enough in school. And even with 17, we look like a class of dolts compared with last year's 21 valedictorians.