Bragging rights
Students and parents cling to the tradition of naming a valedictorian, but a growing number of high schools want to honor more than one top student.
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Mr. Hutton says, however, that he believes many of the questions about grade point averages are coming to the surface now because today's schools have much richer and more varied course offerings then they did a generation or so ago.
When everyone took the same classes, grade point averages were less open to dispute. "In a lot of places, the difficulty has arisen because we're doing a good job of offering a lot of interesting and innovative ways for our kids to learn," Hutton says. "Overall, this is a symptom of a good thing."
But if concerns about class rank have sparked a worthy debate about the way a student's academic experience is assessed and evaluated, they have also stirred up a hornet's nest of other issues. Some, in fact, are similar to the arguments made in the recent US Supreme Court battle over the use of racial preferences in college admissions.
Students and their parents want grades and awards to be assigned in a manner that they deem fair, even as they want to see the college admissions process made as equitable as possible.
But the harder schools work to make things fair, the clearer it becomes that there's no such thing as a totally even playing field.
Parents and students alike long desperately for the whole college admissions process "to be more transparent, more objective," Smith says. "But the reality is that there are aspects that are very subjective, especially at very competitive schools."
That reality, Smith says, "is hard for families to understand."
It's an honor many covet, but does being valedictorian actually predict success in later life?
Yes and no, says Karen Arnold, a Boston College professor and researcher who's been tracking a group of high school valedictorians for more than 20 years.
"They're a good bet for continuing success," Professor Arnold says. "But in general they're not eminent, they're not mold-breakers."
Valedictorians tend to be very conscientious, responsible people who achieve a type of well-rounded success, Arnold says. But what they don't have, she notes, is "that overriding passion for a single thing that is often what makes you eminent in later life."
Arnold's coresearcher, Terry Denny, selected 81 valedictorians graduating from Illinois public high schools in 1981, and he and Arnold have followed them ever since. In 1995, Arnold wrote a book called "Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians" (Jossey-Bass Publishers).
In general, Arnold says, the group that she affectionately refers to as "my valedictorians" are leading productive and fulfilling lives. But not all felt that their academic honors contributed positively to their lives after high school.
The expectations of success that surround a valedictorian are "the hardest thing in the world to live up to," one former valedictorian told Arnold, lamenting later in life that she felt weary.
Another woman felt her academic status pushed her into medical school, not because she wanted to go, but because she had absorbed the idea that the highest-ranked students must choose between medicine or law. After school, she wished she had been free to study French literature instead.
One male valedictorian regretted having focused so hard on his grade-point average. "All that creativity should have been going into an art class," he told Arnold.
The high school valedictorians she has studied are extremely nice people who make positive contributions to their communities, Arnold says. "They're not the ones to set the world on fire, but the ones to sustain it."
