PRESSING THE POINTS
High schools work to ease stress in GPA competition
By PAIGE HEWITT
Special to the Chronicle
Just when Bellaire High lead counselor Shirley Raby thought she had seen it all, along comes Harry Huang.
For years, Raby has watched students outsmart the grade point average system so they could soar to the top of the class. And along the way, she's seen some students overcome with stress.
So while Huang's strategy to win the title of valedictorian was successful -- Huang's GPA is 4.93181; salutatorian Pridi Dangayach's GPA is 4.92156 -- school officials are rethinking how their super grads are recognized.
"There's some question as to what we're going to do because it's gotten out of control," Raby said. "But we're only at the talking stage."
Superachievers have long crammed their schedules with advanced courses -- after all, an A in an advanced class contributes five points toward GPA, instead of four in regular classes.
As well, students have long scheduled those nagging but required four-point classes, like health and physical education, for the last semester of high school -- after the final class rank is calculated. Besides, everybody knows that four-point courses are a ball and chain on a GPA, so it's better to squeeze them out of the equation when possible.
An old practice: Debate is a must -- it satisfies the speech requirement and offers five credits.
A new one: The state's basic diploma plan is found attractive by many a straight-A student because it does not require a fine-art, four-point class.
But even when he was back in middle school, Huang already knew all of those tricks.
And he knew this: If he was going to become the valedictorian of Bellaire High School's Class of 2003, Huang needed to be clever.
He needed to start high school with a mathematical advantage. What he really needed was to dump a four-point class.
And to the amazement of school counselors -- who are now using Huang's strategies as fodder to tweak the system -- he found, or rather invented, a new and perfectly legal way to do it.
Enter "The Harry Huang Maneuver," so dubbed by some of his peers.
Huang is fluent in Chinese. So, to avoid taking Chinese I -- a four-point class -- he simply tested out of the course and enrolled in honors Chinese.
"You have to play the system," Huang said. "You have to carefully pick classes and be careful about when you take them. In the end, it's really who plays the system best."
His grade-point gymnastics worked.
In the increasingly competitive world of class rank -- it is common for grade-point averages to be calculated four or five digits to the right of the decimal -- a fraction can be everything.
And the implications can be big.
Texas students who graduate in the top 10 percent, for example, are guaranteed admission to any public university in the state.
Class rank can also affect what kind of SAT score a student needs in order to gain admittance to college -- for instance, many universities require a higher SAT score for students who graduate in the second quarter than for applicants who finish in the first quarter.
GPA also determines whether a student graduates as valedictorian or salutatorian.
And while many valedictorians pursue Ivy League or private schools, many other Texas grads who are No. 1 take advantage of the state's plan that offers free tuition for the first year of public college -- more than 900 valedictorians did so last year, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
In recent years, the trials of ranking at the top have become so tough -- officials attribute it to a "trickle-down effect" of the fiercely competitive world of college admissions -- that high school officials have been rethinking, or already have changed, how super grads are recognized.
That's because of stress, Raby says.
Kids, she says, are under "too much pressure" to perform, and the sacrifices they make are too big.
So HISD officials are taking a look at policy.
A few possibilities are being discussed.
"We are trying to put fairness into system," she said.
One idea is that there would be no distinction given to the top two graduates -- students could graduate with various levels of honors.
Another notion, Raby said, is to do away with the five-point system, make all courses weighted at four points, and continue the tradition of naming a valedictorian and salutatorian by calculating the GPAs among the top students by their true semester averages rather than by a four-or-five-point system.
Another possibility is to host retreats to help superachievers cope.
"It would be a support system," she said. "So they could learn how to manage stress and balance the demands."
HISD is not alone in trying to ease the pressure among overly ambitious students.
Schools around the country have tweaked class-rank practices in various ways. Some schools have even landed in the courtroom.
Locally, many districts, including Aldine and Alief, still honor the top two spots.
Others, like Cypress-Fairbanks, have made changes.
Kelly Durham, public relations director for Cy-Fair, said the district did away with naming valedictorians and salutatorians in 1999 as a measure to ensure that all students are recognized.
"Many times," Durham said, "GPAs are so very, very close."
Now, top graduates in Cy-Fair high schools are distinguished by three tiers of honors, and students compete to read the commencement by auditioning before a panel of faculty.
Bellaire's top two graduates are the first to say the pressure is "overwhelming."
For salutatorian Dangayach, an award-winning poet whose lengthy résumé mentions years of Girl Scouts, violin concerts, science activities and writing for the student newspaper, the sacrifice has been mostly giving up leisure time.
Dangayach, who is fluent in three languages and studies four or five hours a night, didn't attend a single football game during her high school career.
"I haven't even seen Harry Potter," said Dangayach, who hopes to go to Rice. "Frankly, I'm up to my limit. I really need a break. ... I want to paint my bedroom and watch movies and go shopping with my mom."
Dangayach said Huang's strategy was a little unfair since he is fluent in Chinese but that she harbors no ill feelings.
"My dream was just to make it to the top 5 percent," she said.
Huang offers no apologies. He said he played the game fair and square.
But winning it, he said, came at great cost.
His sacrifices: Sleep, time with friends and family, video games, and extracurricular activities.
"I'm a member of several clubs in name only," said Huang, who is looking forward to catching up on sleep and playing basketball when the load lightens in the coming weeks. "But in the morning when it's time to go to a meeting, I can't get out of bed."
Huang, who hopes to go to MIT, said becoming valedictorian wasn't easy.
"I don't think I'd do it again," he said. "It wasn't worth it."
So why did he do it?
"I wanted to be the best," he said.