[Jay O'Donnell]

You are not alone on this topic, it's a serious problem. GPA and class rank are more of a game than any indication of intelligence or hard work. My class's valedictorian last year took the minimum amount of classes, all of which were AP or honors level, and had a near perfect GPA. This student also never did any elective courses or extra-curricular activities, because their goal was to get the highest GPA.

Many of my other fellow students (including the Salutatorian) who I would deem as better students took more classes (some of them took 8 compared to the valedictorian's 5), but these included non-honors courses such as band, engineering, woodshop/metal shop, art, etc. that kept them from being at the top. This also caused some of them to miss out on their top schools, while their less accomplished classmates with higher GPA's got into their top choices.

So why is this a bad thing? Due to the nature of college applications, GPA is really the only thing that matters. Having just applied last year, I know first hand that there isn't much quantitative information that you send besides your GPA and your test scores. By pushing the GPA game in students faces at the end of every semester, we are pushing students to stray from classes they are passionate about, and instead getting them to take more "core" classes that give them a huge GPA boost. I know lots of my friends didn't explore potential fields of interest in high school because it would hurt there GPA and chances of getting into the schools they wanted.

Another problem this is causing is that lots of kids are taking the honors level courses when they shouldn't be. Pressure from peers and parents to get the highest possible GPA forces them into classes where they struggle, and ultimately fail to actually learn anything in the class as they struggle to simply get by.

The good news? Since I got to college I have a strong feeling that unweighted GPA is used more often than weighted. My reasoning is that talking to my friends from all over the northeast, all of our schools used different systems to weight their advanced classes in regards to GPA, making weighted GPA a bad statistic to quantify and compare. My hope is that colleges know this and use unweighted GPA.

In regards to your question including robotics when it comes to GPA, my school and many others don't even receive credit for our hours put into the team. The amount of time we spend with the team probably hurts our GPA's but in a different way than you are talking about.

As to what we can do to solve the problem: the biggest thing is to stop making kids think that their GPA is all that matters. I know in my high school the only thing our administration told us was to get the best scores and grades possible so we could get into the best colleges out there (and in turn make our school look good.) I hope there is a better solution out there, but I fear that playing the GPA game will only become more common. I hope we can become a society where a passion for excellence and constant learning is the norm.

To any high school students out there reading this, study hard and get good grades no matter what classes you're in. Follow your dreams, explore your interests, and put in the work. When it comes time to apply to college, you'll understand that grades and test scores really are everything, and a lot of colleges may not see FIRST as important as an activity as we do.

Apologies if this seems like a rant, just getting out my frustrations with the system. It's a lot more frustrating when you have to be a part of it.