Senior achievers look back on their hard work

“It’s quite a bit of work to try to stay at the top of your class, and you’d better be prepared for what you’re signing up for,” said senior Matthew Davidian about being in the upper percentage of performance at Clark Magnet. Davidian is one of many students who have maintained a high grade point average throughout their four years of high school.

Davidian’s experience in trying to stay at the top of his class can be commonly seen among many of the high ranking students in U.S. high schools. “If you’re trying to stay at the top of your class, there’s a lot of aspects you need to understand and practice,” Davidian said. But what criteria constitute someone as a higher ranking student compared to others in the same system?

Generally accepted factors for determining a student’s ranking in a school are a high GPA, multiple AP classes, substantial extracurriculars and high scores on standardized tests. Senior Biura Markarian says that she believes the standards for a well performing student have drastically increased in the past decade.

“I’ve taken 5 APs last year and 4 APs this year,” Markarian said. “The standards for being considered a ‘smart’ student have significantly gotten harder in my eyes.” A Baltimore Sun article states that the numbers of students who take more than three AP exams a year has more than doubled in the past decade. Additionally, the article noted that the nationwide standard for the number of APs taken by the upper percentage of high performing students in their high school career has increased from around six to between eight to ten now.

Counselor Susan Howe said that the increase in AP students has driven up in GPAs. “Fifteen percent of this year’s senior class have a 4.0 GPA or above,” Howe said. Additionally, she said that there are six students who are above a 4.4. The number of students with a GPA thats higher than a 4.0 is higher than last year. “That totals up to 37 students who have high GPAs,” Howe said.

While students are taking more AP classes and achieving higher GPAs, the overall attitude for doing well is one that is characterized by a desire for numerical reward. Essentially, “students will sign up for these APs but don’t realize that there is extra work that comes with the extra GPA point,” Howe said. She also continued to say that students are taking AP tests just to take them and are not always thinking about their score. “The AP pass rate is low because many students will neglect fully preparing for it,” she said.

These changes in the focus of education can also be seen in the standardized testing that high school students take in order to get admitted into colleges. The information that students are tested on may not always be universally agreed to be significant. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development has argued that standardized tests, in their current form, are not a good indicator of a student’s knowledge. In addition, some students also argue that the information presented in these standardized tests can often be pointless or useless. “A lot of the information that we’re required to learn for ACT/SAT testing is one-time use information that we can only apply to the test; the information has no real life applications,” Markarian said.

Additionally, while students continue to work tirelessly to maintain high academic stature, the way their classes are structured is changing, namely, in the number of students per classroom. According to the California School Boards Association, the student-teacher ratio for the state is 20:1. This number, compared to the national average of 15.5:1, is disheartening to some students. Many feel as though spending should go to teachers’ salaries and finding a way to divide up classrooms.

“I don’t know the exact ins and outs of statewide spending, but I can say for sure that public school spending is not as much as it needs to be,” said senior Shushanik Stepanyan, another high performing student at Clark. “Classes aren’t as intimate as they should be, with too many students for not enough teachers, and students are essentially left to fend for themselves at school,” Stepanyan said.

Doing well in school can stress a student out — and more often than not students “burn out.” But nonetheless, there are outliers to that majority.

Maintaining a calm composure throughout the anxieties of high school academia is difficult, but senior Raffi Terteryan has managed to keep his cool. “Sometimes it’s really stressful to balance all my classes,” Terteryan said, “but I’m hoping that eventually it’ll all be worth it.” Terteryan currently takes four AP classes, a number that’s mirrored by many of his also high-achieving peers.

However, the pressure to perform well comes from himself, Terteryan said. “I want to do well myself, and sometimes I have to tell my friends that I have to study, they understand too.” Terteryan also said that it’s important to find the balance between having both good grades and good friends.

Beyond the factors of funding and educational stress, however, some of the problems in the current education system are much more deeply rooted. “Learning for the sake of understanding a subject seems to be a foreign idea now,” said senior D’Mario Tevanyan. Davidian also said that “school education has become more geared toward preparation for universities and upper education, but much of the crucial learning aspects seem to be left out.”

With such an emphasis on preparing for colleges and higher education, some believe that the true purpose of classes and teachers seems to have been lost. “I believe that teachers should play a more involved role with their students, so that they can tackle the non educational issues that are affecting their education, but this just isn’t happening now,” Tevanyan said. “There’s just so much focus on preparing for more work that the class itself and the interaction between student and teacher is diluted.”