EAG: CARY, N.C. – The Wake County school board believes the decades long tradition of naming class valedictorians and salutatorians creates “unhealthy competition,” so they voted to end the practice.
Board members voted unanimously Tuesday to ban high school principals from recognizing the top students with the titles and move to the Latin system that uses designations including cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude starting in 2018, The News Observer reports.
“We have heard from many, many schools that the competition has become very unhealthy,” board chairman Tom Benton told the news site. “Students were not collaborating with each other the way that we would like them to. Their choice of courses was being guided by their GPA and not their future education plans.”
The board vote on Tuesday was preliminary, and board members are expected to give the proposal final approval at their June 7 meeting. Under the new system, students with GPAs of 4.25 or higher would receive the summa cum laude designation, those between 4.0 and 4.249 would receive the magna cum laude title, and students between 3.75 and 3.99 would earn cum laude recognition. more
I’m going to as a friend of mine who lives in Wake County to point out that in order to be consistent, they need to stop giving performance bonuses and merit raises to school teachers and administrators. Those nasty things just encourages unhealthy competition, too.
Wouldn’t it be kinder to just make them all valedictorian, kind of like a participation trophy?
Oops. Edit. “I’m going to ask a friend…
Dang fingers.
Very “Fabian” of them to do such a thing.
Cary in particular is very aggressively conformist and egalitarian. I worked in that town from 1997 to 2004 and I well remember that the zoning Gestapo grudgingly offered a list of four different shades of beige with which you were allowed to paint your front door.
My wife was valedictorian back in the 70’s. She is now a doctor
Why do they provide a grading system at all if that is the concern? They certainly can’t validate that they arrived for class, showed up on-time! Why do we have to even go to school? We can get everything from our SMARTphone anyway. My version of siri is smarter than yours nah-nah!
There are so many 4.0s these days it’s hard to differentiate anyhow.
I graduated with Drinque de Bier honors. And yes, the competition was fierce amongst that crowd.
Well no more of those insufferable bumper stickers: “My Kid’s an Honor Student at Jupiter High.”
Yeah Mom/Dad, so is everyone else’s kid.
“My Kid’s an Honor Student at Jupiter High.” No more of those insufferable bumper stickers. ‘Cause, Mom/Dad. so is everyone else’s kid.
Mja’s picture on that headline is offensive. Where are the male valedictorians?
Anon was me both times. I’M having trouble, Houstin Somtin wong.
They do realize, don’t that, that cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude are also hierarchachal? Also, how will they designate those whose grades totally sucked? “With honors” doesn’t get awarded to people with a 1.8 GPA.
**they**
The psychological warfare against the west, and specifically white people, is in full throttle now. Nobody obsesses about the negative effects of scholarly achievement in places where the majority of people have brown skin. That’s a certainty.