Valedictorian lawsuit

Written by

Elisha Marquez has been accepted to Ivy League schools and is on her way to Stanford in the fall. The 18-year-old has already nabbed an engineering internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and earned a scholarship through the Gates Millennium Scholars program.

But her GPA wasn’t high enough and she got beat. These parents need to chill out.



  • tyr

    Dad sounds like a real piece of work : “You don’t want your kid to be a loser. That’s what they’re basically saying. Be a loser.” Hope the kid gets a chance to chill out a little once she goes to college and puts some distance between herself and her family.

  • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

    Dad has a few issues he should stop trying to resolve at the expense of his kid’s dignity.

    • lucascott

      Daddy reminds me of the parents that sue to make the Little League games stop scoring etc so none of their kids get their feelings hurt because they lost. It’s a game for pete’s sake. the nature of games is that someone wins and someone loses. At that point it should be able doing your best, playing fair and having fun.

  • http://www.lazyprogrammers.com Eugene Kim

    Although I do think her parents need to chill out, there is real injustice in the way schools handle AP programs. I may be a little fuzzy on the details, but basically in Texas, anybody in the AP program is reserved a spot in the top 10%. If you aren’t in the AP program, no matter how well you do, you will never be better than even the worst performing AP students. What’s worse, Texas has a 10% rule where the top 10% of any high school is guaranteed a spot at a state-funded university like UT Austin. 75% of their enrollment is automatically filled by anybody in the AP class, so non-AP students (90%) have to fight for the remaining 25% of enrollment.

    • http://www.aichon.com Brad

      That’s not quite correct.

      While the Texas school I graduated from a decade ago did use a weighted GPA scale that tried to encourage students to push themselves by rewarding them for doing well in harder classes, it gave the same scores to everyone who did poorly (got a D or F), making the abuse you’re talking about unprofitable. The top 10% rule is based solely on class rankings, and if my graduating class was any indication, it was certainly possible for students who had never taken an AP class to best ones who took them.

      Plus, the fact that my school allowed any student to take AP classes meant that everyone was on a level playing field. I know some schools have exclusive AP programs that lock students out, but mine did none of that to my knowledge. It simply let students select for themselves.

      Where your outrage at the 10% rule should be directed is at the fact that it does nothing to account for the differences between schools. There was another school in my district that was generally believed to be tougher academically. Most everyone agreed that a top 10% student from their school was likely to be in the top 5% at our school, yet that difference was never taken into account for purposes of college applications.

      Similarly, school sizes can have a big impact. Competition is likely to be fierce if you have a school small enough that only the valedictorian and salutatorian are in the top 10%. In contrast, we had 650 in my graduating class, so there wasn’t much competition between the top 30 of us since we had a pretty large buffer before we’d be in any danger. While we may have earned our place at our school, we didn’t have to work nearly as hard as someone at a smaller school might have had to have worked to earn their place.

      That said, your 75% number is correct, and it’s atrocious. Even though I benefited from the rule, I’d fully support abolishing or limiting it. College is a different animal than high school (as I quickly learned my first semester when I received two Cs and a D, both firsts for me), and they should be able to choose for themselves who is qualified to attend.

      • lucascott

        my school was similar to yours on who could take AP. it wasn’t quite anyone but anyone that qualified to be in the Honors program. And Honors just meant that you had to have a 3.0 average with no more than one C class your fresh year and after you were admitted you had to maintain a B in all non AP classes (or a C in AP)

  • Chuck

    WTF. There are plenty of kids who have sleepless nights by just trying to graduate. She did her best but someone else was better.

    “It’s based on the system that you’re ranked lower, not based on achievement.” ? it’s based on the system that is based on achievements.

    “You don’t want your kid to be a loser. That’s what they’re basically saying. Be a loser.” Did this guy just call everyone who’s not the valedictorian a loser? Nice going there.

    “At the end of the day the grades speak for themselves.” Yes, and someone else was better within the established rules.

  • http://www.theuniversalsteve.com SSteve

    I hope college gets her away from her dad. She gets a 4.5 GPA and he calls her a loser. She’s going to need a good career to pay for a lifetime of therapy to undo the damage he’s done.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_MGKMDABPUEAIAYIL5RC6WGE3AY Schuyler

    I’ve always thought the GPA-higher-than-4.0 concept was ludicrous to begin with- it’s 110% absurd.

    • http://www.aichon.com Brad

      At the Texas high school I graduated from back in 2002, they capped it at 4.5, but you could actually earn as high as 5.33 for an A in some classes. However, since an A in a regular class was worth 4 points, it was harmful to your GPA to earn an A in a regular class if you were already over 4.0. As a result, a popular elective choice among the top students was to take a free period their senior year.

      That’s right: it was sometimes better for the GPA to take no classes at all rather than to work at an A. Ridiculous. That’s my biggest complaint about the weighted GPA system we used.

    • lucascott

      Guess you never took an AP class. I did. Several of them. And I was assigned at least twice the work as those even in the ‘honors’ classes more often three or four times the work. I earned that extra grade point.

      That said, if both girls had the same opportunity to take weighted classes and it was each girls choose to take AP or honors and this ‘failure’ girl choose not to take AP then that’s on her.

      Now at my school if you choose to take study hall that was a 0 point class and was still counted in your grade point average so for many of us it balanced out a little because we had as much as 10 extra points on our total for our four years but lost points on at least one study hall (you could have two over the four years)

  • Ray

    At my high school, 20 years ago, they realized the problem with the 5.0 AP/honors system.

    In the senior year if one student took 5 AP classes and went home early they’d get a higher GPA than another student who took the same 5 classes but then another class without an AP option like journalism or art. Assuming both students got straight As, the student who took the extra class would get a lower GPA.

    So they did away with a pure mathematical valedictorian calculation and awarded the title to multiple students in the top ranks, and selected one or two of those to give the speech.

  • MacsenMcBain

    Hopefully CA has a decent frivolous litigation statute, in case these nutjobs actually go through with a lawsuit. There’s no theory of recovery here.