When Northwood moved to the 10-point grading scale, students breathed a sigh of relief. That frustrating 92 in a class would now be considered an A, effectively boosting GPAs across all grade levels. However, with more students receiving As or Bs in their classes, their GPAs became more similar, and for many that were underclassmen at the time of the change, their GPAs became the same. This raises the question: What do you do when it’s time to choose junior marshals or the valedictorian? When 15 students have the same GPA, they can’t all be valedictorian and speak at graduation. It is the opinion of The Omniscient staff that Northwood should move from exact class ranking to percentile ranking and have top students apply for the honor of speaking at graduation.
As of now, class ranking works by giving students an exact rank out of the number of kids in their grade. This number is on transcripts and reported to colleges. When faced with the issue of having multiple kids ranked at every spot, exact class rank can become a little blurry. By moving to percentile ranking, it allows students to still see where they place compared to their peers, but it also eliminates the issues the school faces when choosing how to handle positions such as junior marshal. Instead of choosing the kids in the top 10 spaces, they can choose the students who are in the top 5 percent of their class. However, this does not eliminate the struggle of choosing a valedictorian.
It has been the tradition at Northwood, as well as many schools across the country, that the senior with the highest GPA is honored as valedictorian at graduation and allowed to deliver an inspiring speech. Now that that highest GPA could be shared among several students, a system should be implemented where these top-ranking seniors should have the opportunity to apply to speak at graduation by submitting a speech to school administrators. It is then the job of the administrators to select the best of the speeches to be given at graduation. Although not all of the top students will be able to speak at graduation, they should still be given recognition during the ceremony.
