Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian

MayorBob.

Posted to Etcetera on Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 05:45:53 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

Anjali Datta is one smart young lady. The 16-year-old from Grapevine, Texas is smart enough to have aced the ACT. She's smart enough to have clearly established herself as the top student in her graduating class. She's so smart she's managed to graduate a year early from Grapevine High School (GHS). Unfortunately, it looks like she outsmarted herself from being class valedictorian.

Datta graduates from GHS with a 5.898 GPA. Tyler Franklin, the closest senior to her in academic standings, has a 5.64 GPA. Yet Franklin, and not Datta, is the valedictorian of GHS's Class of 2008. The reason for this is a school district rule which restricts class valedictorian to those who attend four years of school at GHS. Datta began taking high school level courses in middle school. Then, when she got to GHS, she began taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses. She maxed all her courses - the AP courses gave her additional points to raise her GPA way above the 4.0 threshold. She was encouraged to graduate this year, rather than wait until next year, as she had completed all her requirements. She says she was told by a counselor that doing so wouldn't jeopardize her valedictorian status.

That was fine until somebody read the school district rules on the four year requirement, which was reportedly based on the Texas Education Code. That's four year's attendance requirement, not completing four years worth of school work. GHS officials say they really tried to find a way to make Anjali the valedictorian but they just couldn't get past the four year rule, which was supposedly enacted to preclude a transferring student with a higher GPA from transferring in at the last moment to claim the valedictorian honors. Dr. Jerry Hollingsworth, GHS principal, explained this in an email (pdf doc) to the Datta family. Hollingsworth informed them that GHS was naming Anjali "Valedictorian - Three Year Graduate" to honor her "extraordinary academic achievements" and she will be allowed to address the class at commencement.

Anjali's father feels something rings hollow. Deepak Datta feels GHS is "penalizing" his daughter "for completing a demanding set of classes `too quickly'" thereby sending a negative message to other gifted students. Tyler Franklin receives a college scholarship to go along with being valedictorian. There is no scholarship for being a three year valedictorian apparently. Anjali is troubled by what happened because the state rule doesn't mention valedictorian anywhere; it merely says the scholarship should go to the "highest ranking graduate" in a high school class and leaves it up to the local school to determine who that might be. Anjali believes all GHS has done is diminish the "value of the valedictorian title."

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Tags: edited by port1080, written by MayorBob, high school, valedictorian, Texas, scholarship, Advanced Placement, ACT (all tags)

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1	Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian port1080. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 07:43:30 AM EST 5.00 (astute, astute)

If it wasn't for the fact that there is money directly involved (i.e. from the school itself) I would probably say that the school's "middle path" of making a new Valedictorian title for her and allowing her to speak was more than good enough - but all that does indeed ring hollow if there's no money to go along with it. I saw this sort of gamesmanship all the time in my high school - since we didn't have weighted grading for honors classes, a lot of students dropped out of the honors track to make it easier to maintain their GPA (of our top 10, about half were non-honors students). It makes it a lot more difficult to take learning seriously when you realize that a lot of your peers are coasting by and are going to get the same benefits as you for doing half the work.

This is one lie we tell ourselves often about education - excelling in it doesn't get you as much as is often claimed. They key to success in our American system is to do well enough in school to get into college, but once their the key is to network yourself into the business world through good internships, etc. This is where the money really is - unless you're an absolutely brilliant inventor and savvy about your patent rights, you can almost always make more money in a business career than in even the most well paying professions. For example - two of my cousins (brothers) went to Penn State, did moderately difficult (but not overly so) majors - one biology (with a marketing minor), one information technology, but both networked themselves into the business world through internships and both had well paying jobs as soon as they graduated. The older one has been working and earning a good salary for eight years now and is already making six figures in IBM's marketing department. If he had taken a professional career path (MD, lawyer, research scientist, engineer) he would have just received his professional accreditation a year or two ago, would probably be saddled with debt, and would have lost those six or seven extra years of earnings. This is something a lot of people don't realize, I think, about those of us who go on to receive higher education / professional training of some sort. Sure we end up with jobs that pay reasonably well - but we're losing out on years worth of earnings by taking the time to get that degree.

Back to my main point - what I'm trying to get at is that our system (educational, economic, etc.) doesn't give the biggest rewards to those who play by the rules and excel in the ways we're encouraged to. Those who receive the highest rewards are those who figure out how to work the system in one way or another and subvert it to their own gain. Is it at all surprising that we see so many accounting shenanigans and questionable / highly risky business decisions in our corporate world? These folks have gotten to where they are by believing that they are above the system, that they know how to succeed by skirting the rules, etc, etc. If I'm Anjali, what I learn from this experience is that if I really want to succeed in life I shouldn't bother to do my best and follow the rules - instead I should find a loophole and exploit it for all it's worth. I see that a co-worker is massaging the numbers to get that end of the year bonus - should I report it to my boss and risk his anger (since lowering the co-workers numbers will lower our overall department performance) or should I massage my own numbers so it looks like I did even better than my co-worker did? If I'm Anjali, in that situation, I know my choice - I've already seen what playing by the rules gets you.

2 1	Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian WMK. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 08:50:50 AM EST 5.00 (astute)

Your advice is to cheat?

That is fucked up.

This girl is obviously a mental mega-talent who needs only enough time and opportunity to devour the advanced coursework before she can take her place at the forefront of any intellectual expertise she cares to pursue. She has a superior intellect and so she has a rare and precious commodity that has great value in this world. I hope she learns to value it, herself, and her life on terms she determines to be appropriate and fulfilling to HER. You seem to be assuming a metric where monetary compensation/earnings = worth/value -- that might not be as rock solid an assumption as it might seem. Some people might not be overly concerned with earnings maximization as the ultimate yardstick for success - they might seek fulfillment in a number of other ways (academic achievement, contribution to science/humanity/the world, personal freedom, creative independence, embodying and ideal other than "I'M RICH BEEYOTCH!!!"). It's up to her to choose what is important to her.

Like so many young people of rare or ordinary talent she is at risk for being loaded up with a bunch of ass backwards beliefs about the definitions of 'valuable' and 'fulfilling'. I sincerely hope she can find the strength of character and integrity to avoid the many traps that will line the path of her future. Traps like 'Society is fucked up, life is unfair, the values people and institutions pay lip service to are NOT the values that actually determine outcomes for individuals if you care to analyze just about any scenario in business, justice, politics, or every day life. THEREFORE it is best to adopt the values and behaviors that are actually dominant in society in order to 'succeed' rather than 'play by the rules'. Subvert and exploit the system to your advantage, do not hesitate to leave a swath of victims in your wake, the strong shall devour the weak - that is the dominant paradigm - all else is irrelevant.'

The world may more often than not reward those people who follow the simple ethic of 'the strong devour the weak' and 'rules are for suckers' This girl may apply her intellectual powers to exploring the ultimate implications of the predatory axiom and then transform her theories into actions - some day we may be comparing her to the greatest 'strong men' in history...a conversation conducted with hushed and furtive whispers amongst our fellow survivors in some futuristic concentration camp.

The system IS fucked up and unfair and this girl is not the valedictorian - because of their rules which were created with the assumption that girls like this one didn't exist or need to be accounted for in the future - oh well. If I were her & her family I would demand the school district get off its ass and get some guidance counselor who has heard of something called 'scholarships' and 'ivy league schools' to pick up the damned phone and start shopping this little brainiac to the elite institutions of the world with the goal of getting her a full ride scholarship through a top flight school. If anyone has the potential to increase the greatness of some schools name as an alumnus, it's this girl - so what the fuck is anyone waiting for?

If the quality of Texas school administration is so low that they can't find any adviser/negotiator who can pull off a free ride through a top college for a bona fide genius maybe the family should sue the fuck out of them for incompetence/negligence - if the family is pissing over their desire to break the existing rules because their daughters performance exceeded the anticipatory capacity of the rule makers imagination I think they should get over it as a trivial pause in her rocket ride to greatness.

"...when theft and high crime becomes obscenely obvious to even the blindest beer sucking idiot, it is always the Republicans who are in office." -- Joe Bageant

3 2	Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian port1080. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 10:46:29 AM EST none

Your advice is to cheat?

No, I think you mis-read the point of my post (or I wasn't clear enough). I pretty much completely agree with everything you said in the body of your reply - I value the same values you do. Shit, I'm getting a PhD in International Relations, and I intend on teaching in a small liberal arts college - not exactly a path to money by any means. The whole idea of getting promoted because of who you know revolts me (although I'm well aware that networking is quite important in the academic world as well, but at least we put a veneer on it). I'm doing what I'm doing because I want to, not because of what I'll get paid for it. That said, I think that there are strong incentives within the system that drive people to cheat to get the success they desire - incentives that undermine the values that you and I favor. Therefore, my advice is that we need to change the system so that cheating isn't encouraged. It's easy to say that, of course, but actually doing it is another question - because such a variety of factors are involved and a lot of it just boils down to the sad state of American culture, which seems to value monetary "success" at the expense of all else. Still, one place to start is to make sure that the rules are just, fair, and fairly enforced. You say that this girl and her parents should just live with it and move on; I agree, they should - but it seems that they will not or cannot. Not everyone can easily get beyond a slight like this. If we want to make a better world full of better people, we need to make it as easy as possible for people to act in better ways. Saying that we should just get over ourselves is completely accurate and true - but at the same time, it's something that's been accurate and true for decades now, and we still haven't figured out how to get over ourselves, so perhaps we need to take some concrete steps in figuring out how to do it, and not just expect wholesale culture change to happen spontaneously?

10 3	Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian postillion. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 10:10:43 PM EST 5.00 (astute)

I am trying to absorb the many interesting things that both of you, Port1080 and WMK, have said.

I will say this. I don't think that corporations are subverting "rules" although they might be subverting the law. From my perspective, the games that corporations have been playing for the last ten years are pretty standard across the board: eat up smaller companies (acquire & merge), lay off some people during the merger, do everything possible to make stockholders happy because they are somehow the only ones that matter, make shitloads of money (forget quality of the product), outsource, and then sell off the smaller company acquired. Repeat, rinse, repeat. Of course, what high finance and Wall Street people do is slightly different...but it strikes me that they pretty much are all playing the same game of chicken with shitloads of other people's money.

What Anjali is finding out about is life. After all, she does live in America which isn't known for respecting the intellectual life. If she plans on taking the route of meaningful learning and intellectual development, isn't it best that she realize now that there is almost no monetary compensation that goes along with it? She will be rewarded with a rich inner life and a tremendous rush that comes from learning all the time. In order to live such a life, I would think that it would be better if she didn't play by the rules.

No one I know who lives as an intellectual really lives by the rules of "middle-class" American life. Instead, a lot of them have to learn how to juggle a couple of jobs, or give up the notion of owning a house, or give up a lot of the consumer life that is part and parcel of American life by the rules.

If Anjali wants to be rewarded financially for what she does with her wits, it's rarely going to be for a purely intellectual exercise unless she invents or formulates something "marketable" (like John Nash), and chances of such a "marketable" intellectual discovery is rare. It does happen, but not often (at least as far as I know). There are more brilliant intellectuals who die with their names unknown than there are Einsteins.

But even given that future likelihood of a life lived in obscurity, Anjali can live a life rewarded by intellectual stimulation. Being valedictorian is status and recognition, but it is not the reward itself for learning and thinking.

5 1	Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian HidingFromGoro. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 04:19:13 PM EST none

"what I'm trying to get at is that our system (educational, economic, etc.) doesn't give the biggest rewards to those who play by the rules and excel in the ways we're encouraged to. Those who receive the highest rewards are those who figure out how to work the system in one way or another and subvert it to their own gain."

Damn, I wish I'd seen that before I posted about roids in the EliteXC thread. It's pretty much exactly what I meant to say.

6 5	Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian thefadd. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 04:36:40 PM EST none

I believe it's called "the white people method" ;-)

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

4	Curious... gameCoder. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 11:51:47 AM EST 5.00 (interesting)

How did she manage to get a GPA over 5? Back in my day, an A in an AP class was worth an even 5.0, so 5.0 was the highest possible GPA.

I'm also wondering if her being in high school for only 3 years gave her an advantage in the GPA standings. One less year of school translates into less non-AP classes which would actually bring her average down.

In any case, it seems to me she'll get enough scholarships elsewhere to be able to go where she wants.

7 4	Re: Curious... songofthepogo. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 05:02:55 PM EST none

in my day an A, or an A+ (i've exited some classes with 115%), AP class or otherwise, was worth 4. that was the highest you could go. i am not impressed with these new-fangled GPAs. they're absurd.

8 7	Re: Curious... joshv. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 05:23:29 PM EST none

While I agree in general with respect to GPAs, whatever score is used to determine class ranking should be difficulty weighted - don't care if they want to used a -5 to 11 scale, but however they do it, an A in basket weaving should not be weighted the same as an A in AP Physics.

My high school didn't weight a damned thing, GPA or otherwise. I actually took math classes at the local state university while in high school. Being a bit over my head, I got quite a few Bs. These were averaged right in to my regular HS grades, knocking me out of contention for Valedictorian - not that I particularly cared at the time.

9	More graduation idiocy. MayorBob. Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 07:19:37 PM EST none

But this one just wants to participate in her graduation. This one's in California.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

11 9	Re: More graduation idiocy. Lou. Wed Jun 04, 2008 at 04:36:14 PM EST none

I know it's a broken record for me...but godDAMN, I'm glad I don't work in education anymore.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

11

Re: More graduation idiocy.

joshv.

Fri Jun 06, 2008 at 07:07:24 AM EST

4.00 (interesting)

So being a cancer patient gives you a free pass to graduate without having met the graduation requirements?

12

Re: More graduation idiocy.

Lou.

Fri Jun 06, 2008 at 07:48:01 AM EST

none

Huh?

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

This story: 13 comments (2 from subqueue)

Post a Comment

MayorBob.

Posted to Etcetera on Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 05:45:53 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian

port1080.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 07:43:30 AM EST

5.00 (astute, astute)

1

Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian

WMK.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 08:50:50 AM EST

5.00 (astute)

2

Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian

port1080.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 10:46:29 AM EST

3

Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian

postillion.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 10:10:43 PM EST

5.00 (astute)

1

Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian

HidingFromGoro.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 04:19:13 PM EST

5

Re: Too Damned Smart To Be Valedictorian

thefadd.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 04:36:40 PM EST

Curious...

gameCoder.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 11:51:47 AM EST

5.00 (interesting)

4

Re: Curious...

songofthepogo.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 05:02:55 PM EST

7

Re: Curious...

joshv.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 05:23:29 PM EST

More graduation idiocy.

MayorBob.

Tue Jun 03, 2008 at 07:19:37 PM EST

9

Re: More graduation idiocy.

Lou.

Wed Jun 04, 2008 at 04:36:14 PM EST

11

Re: More graduation idiocy.

joshv.

Fri Jun 06, 2008 at 07:07:24 AM EST

4.00 (interesting)

12

Re: More graduation idiocy.

Lou.

Fri Jun 06, 2008 at 07:48:01 AM EST