Regardless of how your daughter performs in these classes, it doesn’t change the fact that a two letter grade jump is ridiculous. And regardless of what the rest of the school is doing to make everyone equal, they were right to make the weighting more fair.
And I have news for you, bring in an AP class is a kid being recognized for being good at something.
When I was in middle school my director did this. He still held auditions, and each row was the same approximate level, but the chair orders were mixed up. So, while I certainly was a 3rd row musician, I was not necessarily better than the girl behind me. I might have been, I might not. I think at that young age (12-14) he was trying to temper the competition aspect a bit. Plus we weren’t as entrenched in our positions, there were auditions 2x year and moving around wasn’t as tragic when it’s not in strict order.
You must be still in high school.
Your logic is unsound. You assume my position about class rank and bogus valedictory speeches is motivated by my sense that “everything has to be noncompetitive”. This is unwarranted and untrue.
The difference between the valedictorian and the MVP on the varsity football team is enormous. Everyone knows the latter is not any kind of guarantee of special promise or future success. This kid lived it up in high school, but will very likely be pumping gas five years out. It’s a parochial high school mini-achievement whose luster diminishes the minute you graduate.
The same detachment is not applied to academics. If you are at the top of your class, you must be really special. Teachers are telling you that you are brilliant, your parents are telling you that you are brilliant, and everything thinks you are some kind of unique snowflake, primed for success. You’re not. The sooner you recognize this, the happier you (speaking generally) will be.
My position is that the less of this we do, the happier our smart kids will be in the future. You want to know what’s really competitive? Getting a challenging job. Surviving and thriving in a large organization. Creating an idea, implementing it, and getting through to enough people to make it a success. Creating a great work of art. These are meaningful milestones not dependent on a “grade” or on the validation of some authority figure. They certainly have nothing to do with where you fall in some Cro-Magnon high school pecking order. The sooner that kind of nonsense is done away with, the better.
You want to motivate kids to achieve? Then you teach them the value that there is nothing more important than making beautiful music, because it fucking rocks for its own sake. Not because achieving first chair has any kind of intrinsic value whatsoever. You will engender a lifetime passion for music, rather than a lifetime passion for achieving arbitrary benchmarks.
The no first chair thing is part of the whole mentality that a child cannot be recognised for greatness. The directors (yes, there are 2 of them) demand excellence from the students and definitely reward those who deserve it with recognition in class. Officially? Can’t do it.
Whoever thinks I am looking for sympathy, let me set the record straight – I am not. Neither is she. This was just a pissing moment over my annoyance at the whole nanny-state mentality. The whole when everyone’s special, no one is comment is precisely what I am talking about here. My daughter will (hopefully) stand out on a college application on her own merit – regardless of weighting, she has always been in advanced classes and extracurricular activities. She is exceedingly well-read (how many high school students have chosen to read everything they can get their hands on by Dostoevsky?). It looks like she will have 3 languages under her belt by the time she graduates – Latin, Spanish and Japanese. She has yet to meet an instrument she can’t play – she taught herself to play the bass in a matter of months, plays the flute in band, taught herself the guitar and a few other instruments. Not to mention, her interests range from anime to quantum physics and everything between. The kid is bright, interesting and talented.
My whole point is, I tend to agree with her that there’s not much incentive to take the advanced classes, if there’s no weighting. As for learning more? Not so much. The only classes she needs to graduate are senior English (nothing new to learn there), and economics. She has all her other required classes in by now. Will I encourage her to still take honors? Of course, as a mom, that’s my job – encourage my kids to push themselves to be the best. Will it be half-hearted? Yeah, because I think they should be recognised by the school if they manage to be in the top 10% of their class. Damn few kids manage to make it into the top 10% by accident – they get there by hard work. I still respect the hell out of the guy that should have been our valedictorian. He’s a reporter for CNN now – one of my dearest friends. His articles are the ones that make you realise there’s something in your eye 
and he is a great guy.
*SHOULD have been, except that the girl who got it, got it because of weighted grades. Did I mention that they’re not always to the benefit of those that are deserving? Her mother was a teacher who argued that sports shouldn’t count as much as other classes. Our should-have-been-valedictorian was also a basketball player. He got salutatorian because his class period spent for sports didn’t count as highly as her band class did. Yeah. I still like weighted grades.
I’ve got to disagree here. Grade-weighting aside, colleges look favorably upon AP classes. At this point, they are probably so common that avoiding AP classes, on principle or for any other reason, would be a handicap. From a student standpoint I think they’re more interesting as well. I can’t compare the weighting at your daughter’s school to my own, but the one that already existed sounds quite steep and the current system sounds pretty good. I doubt we got five points for AP classes, and the top few students wound up with cumulative averages of more than 100. I always wondered who was supposed to believe that.
I disagree as well, Marley23. Plus, won’t a college look at a student who could have taken an AP class but didn’t and ask why? And if the only reason is the weighting issue, it makes the student look like they don’t care enough. Whereas, if it’s not weighted and they still take it, the college would probably be more impressed than if they were just doing it for the weighting.
I do get that as a parent, you are upset that your child is upset.
But, having said that, this is ridiculous. We got nothing special for taking advanced classes in high school - I didn’t have AP where I grew up so we couldn’t even get college credit. We were supposed to take them because we were interested in the subject and interested in learning. The fact that you say there is ‘nothing new’ to learn in senior English is seriously weird to me - the kid is what, 16, and you think she can learn absolutely no more? There is nothing the world can teach her?
High school isn’t a competition and college won’t be either. At some point a kid is going to have to learn to take pleasure in learning for it’s own sake and measure her progress by herself if she is to succeed in academia. Fixating on grades and GPAs are not really the way to do that. I know there is concern about getting into a good college and I appreciate that, but there is no reason for everything to come down to that one number.
Nonsense. Colleges look at what kind of classes you take, not just the grade you get.
If your daughter suddenly drops all her AP classes, it will NOT look good to an admission board.
The grading system, IMHO, should reflect how someone is doing in their class relative to their peers (as in, those in their class) and NOT to the rest of the school. Giving weighted grades, in general, seems like a bad idea to me.
I mean, the student is already in AP, so they’re in a different track from those who aren’t. So why would any grade a kid gets in an AP class have a standard or remedial equivalent? How is that even relevant if they’re not in a standard or remedial track in any given subject?
Oh, and Litoris, this isn’t directed at you - I’m just a little mystified over the idea of weighted grading in the first place.
Please be careful how you phrase that, us students loathe curves something fierce. I got into a conversation today about them and in my friends 7th grade math class everyone got mid-high '90s so it got curved such that everyone lower than a 95 failed and only people that got 100s actually got an A (curved high B was like 99.5 or something). I’m not sure you were insinuating that, but my rants about grading curves could fill a pit thread alone so I want to head it off if you were implying it.
You are a very fortunate person to know the source of “it” for you. And, in the long run, I think that creativity of all sorts is the answer for most.
Meanwhile, back at the high school, most students do need praise. And those of you who presume to know that everyone is cool with not having recognition are just projecting your own feelings.
Praise is one of the best motivators. It is also what allows teachers to be constructively critical of a student without wounding. The workable ratio is about 3:1, positive feedback to negative feedback. (Yes, sometimes we have to hurt people’s feelings anyway.)
Of all of the things that should deserve recognition and trophies and celebrations surely academic achievement ranks number one! That is the reasons that the school exists to begin with.
Litoris, I think it is especially repugnant that the top 10% won’t be recognized at graduation. They should be seated up front, have different tassles or different colored gowns or caps, and be recognized by name. Either that or the AP students should be so honored.
Is this the school policy or a system-wide policy? Are you outside of the city-county? Find out if the system itself has a policy.
In Nashville two of our public high schools rank in the top 41 according to AP testing in the United States. Yet, I believe the state is preparing to take over because of No Child Left Behind.
I had 4 in my graduating class. My sister’s class had 6.
Nobody is saying no praise at all. Praise in the form of a well earned good grade, a good report card, a positive comment from a teacher, a ‘good job’ and a hug from Mom and Dad - great. Praise in the form of artificially inflated grades, silly prizes, special little feel-good measures like different coloured tassles at graduation? Kind of lame if you ask me. The good kids know they are doing well and the others are perfectly aware of their own shortcomings in my experience.
I get that kids need encouragement, but I don’t agree that they need a ticker tape parade for every minor achievement. Also, if they want to go on to college I think this kind of reward system in high school seems like setting them up for dissapointment to me. You are putting a lot of false importance on GPA rather than learning and interest and breeding college students who expect special treatment at every turn. Not to mention giving them a hugely overblown sense of the place of high school in the grand scheme of things.
Your daughter’s a smart cookie, and that’s the real issue here. She’s going to go far in life despite how her high school records the grades.
At my high school, nothing was weighted at all, and I wasn’t Valedictorian or Top Ten or whatnot–but I was the one girl from my class who went to a Damn Good College. I took the hardest classes available to me and I did what I had to do, and admissions officers saw that. I was upset over not getting any recognition at my graduation for…oh, maybe a week. But the education and opportunities I got from taking the “hard classes” has grown over time and will last me my whole life long.
Well said. I fell victim to the trap of teachers and parents telling me how smart I was and how surely I would succeed, and since I thought I would be coasting through life I never felt the need to develop a particularly strong work ethic. Needless to say reality hit me hard. It even became quite depressing for a while. In retrospect instead of them telling me, “Oh you’re smart, you’ll succeed!” I wish they had told me “Oh you’re smart, if you really work your ass off you might succeed!” Now I’m paying for the mistakes I made as a result of that mentality and basically starting from square one to create a strong work ethic for myself.
I got weighted grades in AP and thought it was kind of dumb. First off, the colleges have their own system so it doesn’t mean anything to anyone who matters. Secondly, it says “AP” right on my report card, no need to give me special bonus points. Thirdly, I know a lot of kids who were tracked into lower-level classes for some very suspect reasons (like having a Mexican last name.) Finally, it discouraged people from taking extra classes because that would dilute their GPA with non-weighted classes. Seems counterproductive.
But then, I’m the one who went to a school with no grades, worked my butt off, learned tons and loved it. People respond to competition in different ways. In an academic setting, I’m personally pretty turned off by it. I’m here to learn, not get in a pissing match with the bright people who should be my colleagues, not my enemies.
I feel you. Nothing ever slapped me on the ass quite like walking out of college after being told how good I was my whole life, and realizing nobody gave a fuck and I wasn’t one bit more special than anyone else. There was a study a while back that said that praising children for “being smart,” as opposed to praising them for doing specific things well, could harm them pretty bad. I tend to agree. I know many people who have been praised into near paralysis and have serious identity problems.
You’re right - that’s not what I was insinuating (at least I didn’t intend to, though if the following is taken as an argument for curves, you’ll have to tell me). What I was saying is this: in my high school, AP students and non-AP students were on different tracks. AP students were rarely in the same class as students who weren’t taking AP classes. So, AP students’ grades never affected the non-AP students’; weighted grades did not exist because it simply wouldn’t have been accurate to have an AP student’s grades or a studen in a standard program affecting others’. If you got an A, that’s what affected your GPA; if you got a C, that was reflected in your GPA. And your grades only pertained to the track you were in, not the rest of the school. That’s one reason we didn’t have valedictorians. It would have been silly - and insulting - to say something like, “Oh, here’s the best of the average; here’s the best of the smarties.” So we had a salutorian who was voted by the students and approved by the teachers. Again, there were only 24 people, so everyone knew who was in AP, who wasn’t and whether they did well or not. In such a small class, it’s hard to keep secrets.
Again, I’m coming from a different perspective because I was taken out of public school at fifth grade; I was in a gifted program at school, but I don’t really remember anymore what that meant, other than separate classes from people who weren’t in the gifted program. In my school, if you didn’t at least do well in standard, you were put on scholastic probation.
My point is that, regardless of the “type” of classe you’re in, I think that you should get the grade you get - period. It shouldn’t count as more or less in a grade in another track. I think that’s ridiculous.
If you’re in AP, you should be held to AP standards and get the grades you get with no consideration of what others are getting, otherwise, why be there in the first place? If you get low grades in AP, I don’t think you should be able to say, “Oh, that’s okay - it’s the equivalent of a B in a regular class.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s not an incentive; it’s a cop out. If you don’t do well in AP, maybe you shouldn’t be in them. (I’m not insinuating that about the OP’s daughter, but it seems like if grades are weighted, then wouldn’t you just try to squeak by in AP so you can get equivalency in a standard version of the same subject?)
This is a tough lesson to transmit and it’s that much harder to do in high school, I think. But it’s the right one anyway. It’s taken me a long time to work it out: a thing has to be worth doing on its own, not just because people who are in a position of power praise you for doing it. Good grades are a means to an end and the goal isn’t supposed to be special colored tassels and other bullshit. It’s just high school, for fuck’s sake. The last thing most kids need is for people to make a bigger deal out if it, it already occupies most of their time and is easily confused with the entire world as is.
Bingo. My early twenties was a serious wake-up call. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
I didn’t want to wear a special tassle for being in the top five of my graduating class. I sure as shit didn’t want to hear my name over the PA for being one of my school’s two or three national merit finalists. For god’s sake, I knew I was a little different and further reinforcement was further alienation.
Because where I sit now, no one gives a fuck.
Now over-praised, over-managed kids are well in the workforce. I have to work with and manage people like this. People who still need a ratio of 3:1 empty praise to constructive criticism. Their parents and teachers didn’t do these kids any favors, believe me.
This is one reason I left my previous job. They promoted these overpraised narcissists because they were hand picked by one guy who was later fired for sexual harassment. This woman - 26 years old - had clearly gotten patted on the back one too many times and was so offensive to clients that they hung up on her and eventually refused to engage in conference calls they knew she would be attending. She was lucky enough to have been hired by the right person, so she advanced anyway, but now her product is falling apart and no one will work with her. She’s failing horribly and doesn’t know how to fix it, in part because she’s never been expected to fix her own problems and has been pampered and babied all her life. Every time she’s criticized, no matter how genty, she’s either outraged (because she’s so smart and special and knows it, but these “idiots” clearly aren’t smart enough to get that) or starts to cry (because people are so mean!).