Same with after college to the workplace, no one cares about your grades. Although this worked in my favor because I did terribly in college.
What’s the saying?
“What do you call someone who got all D’s in med school?”
Doctor. You call them “Doctor”
Cue the sequel: “I’m a doctor of philosophy, magna cum laude!” - “Yeah, cool, I’d like ketchup with my fries, thanks.”
As a non-American I have seen those words “valedictorian” and “grade point average” probably a thousand times before, but I stil have no idea what they actually mean
We have them in Canada, I assume they work the same:
When your work is assessed, you get a letter grade in the range from A-F. E is absent, although some regions will use E instead of F. Your letter grade is determined by your percentage.
Letter grades aren’t super useful to show your overall results, and are difficult to average, so they can be converted back into numbers. You start at 0 for F, then skip over E to get to D which is worth 1.0, C is 2.0, etc. GPA doesn’t go higher than 4.0 at A, or 85%, so there’s actually quite a lot of margin for error to allow people the maximum GPA if they test well.
Oh, and your letters might get a + or - to show you’re on the high or low end of a grade. There’s a lot of range between a C and a B, but C+ is close to B-. A + is worth 0.3 on your GPA, and a - is worth -0.3
Also, your letter grades and therefore numeric GPA is a non-linear scale, and the conversion for what percentage converts to which letter might differ depending on the institution, school district, or region.
Isn’t it so simple?
Valedictorian is a bit easier to understand. At graduation, one student is selected to be Valedictorian, and their function is to give a speech at the graduation ceremony.
Traditionally, it’s the “highest performing” student, but GPA caps out at 4.0 which means that two students with an 87% and 98% average have the same GPA and are therefore equal. Their social achievements are then considered, so the valedictorian will usually be someone who was very active in extracurricular clubs or sports.
Basically Valedictorian is usually the most popular student who got straight As.
Thanks for the explanation.
GPA doesn’t go higher than 4.0 at A
Honors / AP classes would like to have a word with you.
At least everywhere I’ve been to school where you have a GPA, these classes get an additional point when calculating your GPA, meaning an A is worth 5. A number of students graduated from my high school with cumulative GPAs of 4.1+, the nerds.
What’s dumb is how honors / AP / IB classes are weighted and get higher GPA, but dual-enrollment doesn’t. For those who don’t know, dual-enrollment means you are literally taking a college level course and you will receive college credits from it. I did this in my Junior and Senior year of HS with my local community college, and it got me out of some prerequisites once I got to college.
AP/IB is typically accepted, but not always, and so students are taking a gamble on these classes that might not even get them ahead of others in college.
It’s so fucking dumb to me that we put the other two programs on such a high pedestal while actual college classes get treated like an afterthought.
Why bother with the letter grades anyway if you just convert them to numbers? We have a system that works from 1 to 5 where 1 is not a passing grade and anything above that is. The average is then calculated normally.
I think it’s historic, I suspect the letter grades predate using GPA
To be honest, I didn’t even know we did GPA at all until after I got my high school transcript for applying to college. Our report cards gave us our percentage and a letter for each course
As the meme suggests, the whole system is pointless and frankly kind of foolish
not me lmao ain’t no way I got a 4.0
😲He was #1!
Emphasis on “was”. I think a lot of us feel that way.
