Black Mississippi student forced to share valedictorian title with white student who had lower GPA

[pnwmom]

70. I had 35 in my graduating class. We didn't do that.

And my kids also went to small schools, and they didn't do that. Having someone else's parent trying to keep track of every grade of yours is not a necessary feature of small schools. Friends don't have to always -- or ever -- share grades. It's completely optional.

And with a mother as pushy as this one, imagine the pressure her daughter was under. Suppose she got a B in calculus, and the mother is horrified. The mom asks what Susie got. Isn't there some pressure on the daughter now to say that Susie got a B, too -- or even a C? How do we know that when her daughter reported back to her, she was always telling the truth -- she never felt any pressure to fudge the truth? Or that the other girl never told this girl what she wanted to hear? "Oh, you only got a B? Don't worry, I did, too!"

There are so many ways this woman's efforts could have gone wrong. And the worst part is the lesson she was teaching her daughter. It's not the grade. It's what you're learning. And sometimes it's better to fail at a hard thing on the way to learning more. This is why some of the top schools don't look strictly at GPA. They'd rather have someone with a 3.7 and a science project in the garage and a summer in a local lab than another kid with nothing to show but a 4.0 in easy subjects.