Nov 28, 2012 10:18 AM
Beginning with the class of 2014, Southampton High School students will no longer vie for the salutatorian and valedictorian distinctions.
Southampton School District Board members officially eliminated the traditional ranking and weighting system at Tuesday night’s board meeting. Instead, high school courses will not be weighted and rigor will be reflected in course titles alone. High achievers, meanwhile, will be recognized as cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude, based on academic performance.
The board also approved a new policy that would allow students to take online courses that are not offered at the school, but would be subject to the approval of Dr. Brian Zahn, principal of the high school.
After several months of reviewing the grading and ranking policy, the board finally moved toward what it sees as a... more
Southampton School District Board members officially eliminated the traditional ranking and weighting system at Tuesday night’s board meeting. Instead, high school courses will not be weighted and rigor will be reflected in course titles alone. High achievers, meanwhile, will be recognized as cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude, based on academic performance.
The board also approved a new policy that would allow students to take online courses that are not offered at the school, but would be subject to the approval of Dr. Brian Zahn, principal of the high school.
After several months of reviewing the grading and ranking policy, the board finally moved toward what it sees as a... more
Also, have they changed how things work with respect to transfer students? The salutatorian in my graduating class had transferred into SHS during high school.
As for transfer students becoming val or sal, it always depended on what courses a student had taken before transfering. Some schools curriculums are behind Southamptons, some are ahead, some might be the same. If a student came ...more from one that did not offer advanced classes in Intermediate school, there was no way that student could catch up with the weighting system, not even with a perfect record, so no way to become Val or Sal even with straight 100s. The Sal in your year had to have come from a school that had the same courses or might have come from one offering more advanced ones so entered with extra weight.
Another reason for eliminating val and sal is that nowadays some kids score with hundreths of points of each other after weighting. They are so close that the difference is meaningless. Larger schools would have declared them all Vals and been done with it. Colleges know that top kids are very closely ranked and take it into account. They are more interested in the whole student and the student's intellect and interest in continued learning than if they were Valedictorian at their high school. How do I know? Because several told me so when I asked about it.
Their hard work and enthusiasm deserves public recognition, and in turn, a little home town publicity might inspire other students. Althletes have been given far more coverage than kids who ...more excell in their area of interests. Switch that up a bit. You might even find that some of the athletes you cover are scholars also.
And here I thought competition was supposed to be healthy for kids. Apparently not.
~ Syndrome, The Incredibles (2004)
A disconnected aristocracy is another.
***************, and [expletive deleted].
The only real incentive one should need is the improvement of yourself. Do we really need a cookie every time we "do good"?
I feel like this is a "Woody Allen" moment, straight out of Annie Hall.
In fact, just in case you don't get the reference, look it up.
It should be the faculty, and graduating class in tandem who have the say if more than two "top achievers" are on hand. Academics are not everything. Civics, athletics, and other realms of societal participation are all indicative of character, and thusly "achievement".
If there are more than two candidates, democracy should prevail.
The High School spent years looking into this issue and is doing the right thing. Finally, all the kids who take the most rigorous courses, and who do well, are going to be singled out ...more and rewarded for their hard work, just as they should be. Some years there have been many outstanding kids with virtually the same excellent averages, yet few knew about their achivements. In other schools all of them would have been named Valedictorian. It will be nice from now on for each high achieving student to be acknowleged for their hard work, and for younger students to know that they have something to aspire to when they become seniors.
And, at long last, kids who transfer in from other schools, such as Tuckahoe, will be will be able to earn equal merit for their scholarship as kids who had gone to SH Intermediate. With the weighting system, transfer students who hadn't been able to take certain advanced math or science courses at their former schools, because they weren't offered there, could never be Valedictorian. Not even if they earned a perfect 100% in every course they took at SH, because weighting-wise they were always playing catch up.
The hell you say...
I came from a graduating class from which it was difficult to choose a pair of high achievers. We had at least a dozen. When it came down to choosing our Valedictorian, it was decided that since one of the top achievers was our Class President, she should speak at Commencement.
Those of you who simply want to single out two people on merit, remain blind to the many who are on a similar level.
Evolve, ...more for Providence's sake.
Admittedly I was not one of them, and of course they were people who disagreed with how the speaker was chosen. That's just life.
Take some of your earned income, and purchase a lesser degree of ignorance.
What part of that did your below par reading comprehension skills not garner? Crap, we don't have one gold medalist standing "a solo meo" on a podium. Christ, it's the end ...more of the world as we know it. There is no "I" in team, and that's an indisputable fact. Just because you happen to be born with the skill, or dumb luck to be "chief", doesn't bless you with the arrogance to be treated like you don't need anyone else to maximize your talent.
Becaus YOU DO.
By the way, who printed all those books you have to sutdy anyway? Oh yeah, a publishing company, or team of employees whose goal is the production of books. No matter how you slice it, you've always got someone backing you every day. Though it is in the end up to you what you achieve with the brains and/or skill you've been gifted with, you never truly do it alone.
I also want to know what you mean by team? Are you bringing a team to your first day of college or first job? We are raising kids that are neither independent nor have common sense. You need to stop this white glove treatment in real life everything is not easy, and there will ...more be no team to save you. With your thinking there will be no gold medals at the Olympics everyone will get a metal. How about no MVP's in Baseball, and football. There soon will be no reason to make things or strive to be better and then we can become socialists. When this society stops rewarding people for doing well, and hard work we should just become a colony of North Korea.
You fail to distinguish the difference between athletics, and academics. The "gold medalist" wisecrack was a segue analogy regarding which you apparently got an "F" in sarcasm comprehension 101. As far as the "team" goes, unless you are a one man business, in one vehicle, promoting a single product, or service, then you are backed by a team every day you go to work, or head off ...more to a job interview. Oh, but what about the team of people who built your vehicle? Or the team of people who designed it? Or the team of people that keep the refinery running so you don't have to beat feet like Fred Flintstone? Or the team of mechanics who keep public transportation running? What would your life look like if you were "a solo meo"? I'll tell you what it would look like: Grizzly Adams. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and this planet is on loan to us from future generations.
Make your point of view quite a bit less narrow/selfish, and maybe you'd view the world a bit differently. And the Socialism card? Played out considering North Korea is a Stalinist communist dictatorship.
As far as "common sense" or independence goes, well I learned that from my parents/family and it was not the responsibility of the school to teach self reliance. That's just a lazy expectation.
And, lastly for the sake of forum etiquette, please keep your reply in sync with the originating comment.
The system has gotten wise. Deal with it.
Maybe your advanced, weighted course should be how not to read your own personal feelings into another's opinion. And, possibly a nice course in deflecting your anger away from someone's opinion simply because you don't like it. That's called diplomacy, by the way.
Oh, and carbon, plus oxygen, plus silicon equals iron. I like astrophysics.
So much for "no assumptions".
Based on his typing skills, he has a point. His keyboarding teacher WAS overpaid.