Incentivizing the True, Good, and Beautiful

The administration recently decided to alter the traditional practice of choosing a valedictorian and salutatorian and adopt, in its place, a system of tiered-academic honors.  The change will take effect with the class of 2028.  This year’s senior class will be unaffected.  There are a number of reasons to consider this step, which are outlined below.  The principle-based summary is that students respond to incentives, and the incentive structure can be improved to better align with the school's priorities as a classically-oriented school.

For example, the method for choosing a valedictorian and salutatorian can provide an adverse incentive when students are selecting courses.  Students will ideally take electives based on their interests and engagement with the academic material or the instructor.  Instead, students in the running for these top honors are incentivized to select whichever course carries the highest weighted GPA points to gain an edge in a competition often decided by tenths-of-a-point differences in weighted GPA.  To put the same issue slightly differently, the current system unduly emphasizes concurrent enrollment and AP classes.  These classes are a wonderful convenience for families, saving students money and time during college and allowing them to demonstrate proficiency in college-level work as they apply to schools, but maximizing participation in these classes is not the educational goal of our institution.

In a related quirk of using the weighted GPA to assess honors, students are actually more likely to become valedictorian if they select a study hall instead of an unweighted elective, even if they earn an A+ in that elective.  It would be far better for students’ education if the school incentivized intellectual exploration in its honors system.

Finally, not every subject matter has enough heavily weighted courses to allow a student to be in the running for valedictorian.  Students with interests in certain disciplines therefore have the clearest path to this honor.  Not prioritizing weighting in the honors structure will treat all subject areas as equally deserving of students’ time and attention.

Given the desire to properly incentivize Liberty students, or put another way, to fulfill the school’s classically-oriented duty to help students rightly order their affections, the changes described below will replace and enhance the current valedictorian/salutatorian process while opening the potential benefits of academic honors to more students.

How the New System Will Work

Beginning with the class of 2028, Liberty Common High School will recognize three tiers of graduation honors as follows:

• All LCHS seniors earning a 4.0 unweighted GPA will be granted the school's top-academic honor, graduating summa cum laude.
• Students with GPAs from 3.75–3.99 will graduate magna cum laude.
• Students with GPAs from 3.5–3.74 will graduate cum laude.
• In place of the valedictorian address at graduation, the LCHS faculty, or a designated subcommittee, will meet and select one student from the summa cum laude graduates for the honor of addressing his or her peers and families.

The benefits of this system include:

• The advantage, in a college-preparatory school, of using the same honors nomenclature typically used on a college campus.
• The new system links naturally with the current honor-roll process, which uses the same categories and also uses unweighted GPA.
• The highest honor, and any future benefit that might be associated with earning it, is extended to a larger pool of deserving students.
• Excellence in every academic discipline is respected without unduly giving honor or influence to classes associated with concurrent-enrollment partners or the College Board.
• This change returns the weighted GPA to its original purpose to benefit students as they completed college and scholarship applications, not as a way to define internal school priorities.
• Although the school will use the term summa cum laude at the graduation ceremony and in its communications, something like the following language will be included in the Student-Parent Handbook to ensure students do not lose any benefits associated with the term “valedictorian:"

“Any student earning an unweighted 4.0 GPA, and completing at least two years at LCHS, will earn summa cum laude honors.  Any summa cum laude student could appropriately consider himself or herself the co-valedictorian of his or her graduating class and is authorized to use the term valedictorian on any resume or application where it may provide an advantage.”

The valedictorian system has served the school well.  The excellent academic records produced by each of the school’s valedictorians and salutatorians have been a source of inspiration, and each has richly deserved the honor.  This new structure will help better incentivize a well-rounded liberal-arts education, encourage more exploration of diverse subjects, and extend graduation honors to larger numbers of highly deserving students.