After the hockey trophy lawsuit, I’m not really shocked to see some kid is suing over an A versus an A+. The part of the case that annoys me is that the school gives out A-F grades on what looks like a work-study project. Before I graduated, I spent four semesters as an undergraduate research assistant. It was on a credit/no credit basis, and only counted as an elective. The reward was the experience. As much as I would have loved some additional As to inflate my GPA, I think it’s much fairer to give out credit for something like that. I’ll bet anything this kid wouldn’t have done the project if it didn’t give him a chance to get another A.
My high school weighted AP and honors classes according to a 5 point scale, and everything else according to a 4 point scale. One of my best friends graduated third, in a class of about 750, because the valedictorian was in a lot of honors music classes as well as AP classes.
I wish that had been the case at the schools I went to. Most of the “bonus” questions I saw were sickeningly easy. Not even related to the course material, even. Stuff like, “What color tie is the teacher wearing?”
If it weren’t for the fact that a more deserving student would lose their slot, I’d almost like to see this loser get accepted to Harvard just to watch how hard he gets smacked down by the stark fist of reality. Sue the school? Gee, somehow, I think Harvard could find a lawyer or fifty somewhere to string up this crybaby and his mommy’s law firm like a couple of pinatas.
When I was in high school, they determined class rank based on the 100-point scale. (We got percentage grades in all of our classes.) There were three of us with 4.0s, but we were separated by 0.2 points each. I was third. The worst part of it was that I had taken more and harder classes than these girls–my anatomy & physiology to their home ec, my Spanish to their library aide. (We didn’t weight classes.)
The school administration saw this coming (it had happened before) and thought it was unfair, so they planned to change to the 4.0 scale that year. This would not have affected the class rank, except that we would all three be co-valedictorians. However, the mother of the girl who was #1 raised holy hell with the administration, threatened legal action, etc. (The student didn’t have much say in the matter.)
My mother offered to go raise some hell of her own, if I wanted her to. I told her I didn’t want her fighting my battles for me. Besides, I already had a full scholarship to UK locked up, so I didn’t care. (Well, I did want to give the speech at graduation, but this allowed me to sit in the back and cut up instead, so it was win-win.) The administration caved, the policy held, and we all went on with our lives. I can’t say it has held me back.
Moral: the difference between an A and an A+ is meaningless. I know that’s hard to realize, when you’ve been told all your life that a 2% difference on that test is the difference between Harvard Law and the deep-fry station, but no one really gives a rat’s ass. Or, more correctly, you shouldn’t pay any mind to the opinion of those who give a rat’s ass, and if you want to look like an insufferable prick, make it clear that you give a rat’s ass.
This is a good example of why grades suck. As a gradeless girl at a formerly gradeless university, I’d like to note that this kind of BS doesn’t really happen when students are evaluated on an individual level about exactly what they did or did not do in class.
In my high school, the valedictorian candidates were faced with a dillema. Our school offered an extra jazz band class before school. However, because that class was not weighted like honors classes, it would dilute the GPA of students who chose to take it. They would not be in the running for valedictorian because their GPA could not get as high as a student only taking a regular course load with honors classes. In other words, the most dedicated people in our school had to choose between persueing extra classes in the things they love or getting the recognition they deserved.
People go to ridiculous lengths for the sake of maintaining their GPA, and it puts increadable pressure on them to serve a letter or a number instead of serving knowledge and learning. For many kids school has nothing to do with learning at all, and is instead just a chance to get a certain letter or number on their report card. We’ve lost the point of school entirely! I find this harmful to the individuals involved- both the truely inspired student and the one who is only in it for the grade, and has contributed to the epidemic anti-intellectualism in America.
For the record i find it annoying that at least at my UC(davis) an A+ = A =/= a-
I agree with the +/- system for fine-tuning grades, but why not be consistant and allow the truely exceptional students benifet?(I only wish I were one of those). That said, other then that slight annoyance NO ONE GIVES A SHIT FUCK ABOUT GRADES GET THE FUCK OVER IT.
You forgot the part about the work-study being at his mom’s law office! As if she’s gonna give him a less than perfect score and ruin her little darling’s chances to be valedictorian. :rolleyes: I can’t even believe the district allows students to be graded directly by their parents, what a sham.
Not only extra credit, but some teachers also use funny curves to adjust the grade spread. Some use a simple bell, but most use a slightly rightward skewed bell, such that a bulk of students end up with Bs (since this was an honor’s class). Fair or not? I once ended up scoring 137% on a test after the curve. Lucky for me, as I missed a whole page of questions on the last test and got a 60%. Ended up with an A+ in the end.
Different teachers have different ways of applying the curve, and some use a simple so-many-points-to-your-score system which produces a lot of 100+%.
That said, in both university and high school, A+'s were not weighed higher than A’s. A 4.0 is the max. Pluses and minuses counted for plus or minus .3 GPA points.
That said, to concur with other posters, the difference between an A and A+ in one class, heck even the difference between a C and an A+ in a single class is unlikely to make the slightest difference into whether one gets admitted to Harvard or not.
Actually, the grade he got was the same grade he would have gotten had he taken the class in the Memphis school system to begin with. An A+ grade is usually equivalent to a grade between 97-100 in a numbered system. An A is usually equivalent to 90-100 in a system with no pluses or minuses. Why should this student have a higher GPA than students who were alwasy in the Memphis district just because he
transferred? There are surely students who were always in the Mephis district who received grades of “A” for grades between 97 and 100.
That’s what it was like in my school - bonus questions were more to give the exceptionally stupid/apathetic/otherwise-failing students a chance to pass the test, than to reward the gifted students.
My wife is currently having to deal with a student who got an A- and feels he sould have gotten an A. His reasoning? “Other people in my family went to this school and got straight As, so I know it’s not that hard to do.” So he expects her to re-evaluate all of his work so that he can get an A.
I suggested she wait a week and then tell him, “You know, I looked again at all your assignments, and you’re right, it wasn’t an A-. I gave you a B instead.”
Color me confused, but if the highest grade his school gives out is an “A” and that’s what he got, why is he wailing? No one in his school will be able to get a higher grade than he did. Or is it that he wants to be miles above everyone else?
This reminds me of a horrible girl from my high school who tried to take Band pass/fail so it wouldn’t mar her glorious GPA (honors classes were weighted). She sounds a lot like this kid – always scheming to get the best grades without really thinking about the learning aspect of being in school.
That story, at least, had something of a happy ending. She applied to Yale Early Decision and got flat-out rejected. I asked one of my teachers why and she said that admissions people are good at reading between the lines in recommendations and they probably picked up on what kind of person she was, despite her stratospheric GPA. I don’t know how much there is to that statement, but it’s an interesting thought, especially in light of this stellar example of litigious brattiness.
Damn, I’m glad I never bought into that. I hadn’t ever really thought about it-but that’s probably why I graduated only sixth in my class. Too much band … Fortunately, I never really cared where I stood in the GPA rankings. And I still got a full scholarship to a good university, at which I continued not to care about GPA.
Oh, the ratings when I asked that to a Minolta executive’s son would have been through the roof.
Goddamned mother fuckin’ leeches.
And it’s a little known secret I have: I can feel the callouses on your hand when I shake it. If you got 'em and yer in my graduating class, yer at least earning a living. Not having it provided for you and sheltered by Mom and Dad’s corporate success.
Tripler
Fuckin’ leeches. Go earn a goddamn living!
Wow, did we go to high school together? I was in school with a pair of straight-A twins who refused to take a programming class for the exact same reason, even though they wanted to study engineering. They did all the work necessary to get an A, but never read a book that wasn’t assigned and never picked up a newspaper.
I’m being a bit harsh, though. They were really nice kids, their priorities were just screwed up.
(I was also in a slew of weighted/honors classes back in high school and one of them was a chemistry class. I informed the teacher at the beginning of the course and throughout the semester that I was color-blind and because of that I’d have problems with certain labs. So what does she do? In the final she gave a titration question/lab and we were supposed to figure out the pH of the mixed solution. By color. So, I sauntered up to her desk, explained my situation again and found out that life just ain’t fair. “I forgot about you,” she said. “You’ll just have to guess.”
Bleh. So I slunk back to the table and did just that.)
I got it right! I got it right! I was one of only a handful of people who got it right!
I hate to nitpick but where in the article did it say that his family is rich? I have seen numerous comments in the post referring to the kid as a little rich kid but see absolutely no cite in the article for it. Perhaps we assume that the family is rich because the mother is a lawyer? I know a few lawyers who make fairly little money. The reason I bring it up is that the image of “rich snotty type” as opposed to “hard working high school student” tends to sway opinion. for the record I do not agree with suing the school although we may not be getting the whole story in this small article.
