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i'm courting your answer

my high school ranks all students above a 4.0/100 gpa as 1, and consquently i am ranked first in a class of 576ish.

all the schools i'm applying to of course have a 'how many students share this rank' question after the rank question on the councelor's section, and for my school like 20 people will be summas. is there any way to show them i am really in the top two, maybe the real-life valedictorian?

[also i'm this thread and i would fall at your feet and bring you flowers if you'd comment :-D]

By Dave Berry on Sunday, September 01, 2002 - 11:08 am: Edit

No flowers necessary, monica. Your school no doubt does a numerical computation (to three or four decimal places) for GPA. You should find out from your counselor exactly where you stand, or at least get his or her assurance that your exact relative standing will appear on the counselor form. You may not have access to this information, but your counselor should be able to report it to your colleges,

BTW, how does your school determine who will give the valedictory address at graduation if there are 20 vals? Does each one read just a couple of sentences?

By monica on Sunday, September 01, 2002 - 02:59 pm: Edit

the rumor is that once upon a time, the salutorian committed suicide over not being named valedictorian, and so our school did away with actual ranking.

now, people who are summas will try out to give the commencement speech in front of english teachers, assistant principals, and the speech teachers.

generally the speech kids get it, heh.

By Mark (Mark) on Sunday, September 01, 2002 - 05:09 pm: Edit

Being a valedictorian clearly isn't everything if you're aiming for the top schools. I go to a very competitive high school with only one valedictorian per year. Last year the salutatorian ended up at Harvard, while the valedictorian got rejected from Harvard and went to GWU's Honor Program with a $20K scholarship (not bad at all, but not the school he had hoped for). Go figure.

By monica on Sunday, September 01, 2002 - 07:39 pm: Edit

yeah i know. people online seem to also like giving me the: "Well, Harvard rejects 50% of 1600s, so you shouldn't even apply!!"

1. don't really want to go to harvard
2. 50% > 20% normal selectivity anyway.

boo.