I graduated High School with a 6.022 GPA[1]! Texas is Awesome!
1. Normal max is 4.0, school gave extra credit for Advanced Placement and college concurrent courses.
1. Normal max is 4.0, school gave extra credit for Advanced Placement and college concurrent courses.
It is massively stupid and unfair -- but there is a part of me that sees that as preparation for real life, a great deal of which is run in stupid and unfair ways. While you'd like to change that, you also have to know how to respond to it when you can't change it.
However, many of the AP classes were hard, to the point that the AP exam was laughable. The average grade in AP Biology was a C+, and more than 85% of the class got 5s on the exam. Same thing with calculus, physics, chemistry...
The valedictorian took AP Psychology, Statistics, Environmental Science, and US History, and then went down to the easiest Honors classes he could take. Just a .25 penalty on his GPA bonus... but he was getting 100s in the classes.
The kids who were looking for the hard classes to learn had much lower GPAs.
I enjoyed band so I took it and they didn't have an honors or AP version. So for me to maximize my GPA would mean that I would have to forgo band all four years of my high school existence in order to min-max for GPA.
And indeed, I believe the valedictorian did exactly that, for exactly that reason.
That is indeed exactly what happened -- the valedictorian was in all of the same advanced/AP classes as the rest of the top 10 students. But while each of us had additional classes like band, choir, or drama, she simply took the minimum number of credits, and as a result ended up with a slightly higher GPA. I actually ended up dropping all the way to fifth because I was taking math at a local college (multivariable calculus, linear algebra) which was treated as an ordinary course for GPA.