Academic honors

360 high school graduates.

• 40: cum laude
• 26: magna cum laude
• 76: summa cum laude
• 17: 4.0 average

You expect the distribution to have a diminishing tail to the right, don't you?

The obvious explanation is that there's a bit of gaming going on: that the cutoffs are based on GPA and not relative difficulty of the courses involved. I'd weight a B in chemistry or French III more highly than an A in PE. Perhaps I'm biased--I did horribly in PE. If you're already doing "well enough" selecting an "easy A" course would help push the average up, maybe to the next category. That wouldn't work unless there was already a bit of grade inflation, and 44% getting honors seems a trifle inflated.

I got a little grumpy with the student speeches. They were way too "change the world" You know, there are billions of other people with different ideas about that: it makes for a lot of pushback, "follow your heart," A famous shortcut to disaster, etc -- though the last one emphasized that the world wasn't friendly and you needed adaptability and willingness to get up after disasters. Bravo!

Quibbles to the contrary, the graduation went well. The graduate seemed a trifle overwhelmed, and expressed a preference for low key celebration: pizza and games at home instead of a restaurant.