Between 1990 and 2000, the over-all mean G.P.A. of high-school students increased from 2.68 to 2.94, which is attributable in part to grade inflation and in part to the fact that students are working harder. Last year, more than a million students took at least one A.P. course. During the nineteen-nineties, the percentage of students taking A.P. or International Baccalaureate classes in math more than doubled, from 4.4 per cent of graduating seniors to 9.5 per cent. My own high school, North Hollywood High, in Los Angeles, had three or four A.P. classes when I graduated, in 1979 (a time when we were told that our most illustrious alumnus was Bert Convy, the game-show host; Susan Sontag had gone there, too, but nobody mentioned her). Now it has twenty-two.
Some schools, responding to the critique that competition has got too bruising, have decided that naming a single valedictorian is part of the reason that today‘sstudents have become so anxious. (Many small private schools came to this conclusion long ago, and never adopted the valedictorian tradition.) —Margaret Talbog —Best in Class (New Yorker)
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Absolutely. Do away with it since it only encourages students to try harder (even find clever ways to follow the rules) to be the best.
And, while we're at it, Player of the Year should be abolished in all sports, and the first five cars to reach the finish line at Nascar events are all the winners, and boxing--where contenders are actually encouraged to physically draw blood--well, why not just name them both good fighters?
After all, we can't let the less-than-the-best get traumatized if they don't win, right?