Off Topic Senior year joys

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My school has a weird grading scale...its from 0 to 14, with 14 being an A+, 12 being an A, 10 B+, 8 B, etc. AP and honors classes are weighted 1.5 on that scale, and Accelerated HS classes taken in 8th grade or freshman year are weighted 1.3. So an A+ in an AP class is 21 out of 14, and that pushes your GPA up bigtime. Mine is well into the 16 range, and the conversion to the 4.0 scale (which is what my school district does for college applications) is approximate.

And yes, we weren't old enough to vote in 2000 or 2004. And most of us still not in 2008!

History lesson for the non-Americans here: Bush got less votes than Al Gore in 2000. About 540,000 less to be exact, and the closeness of that election was within 1%. But we don't elect our president here in the USA by the "popular vote" of the people, we have this thing called the Electoral College, where pretty much the States elect the president. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes, which is equal to the number of congressional representatives that the state has. So every state has 2 Senators, and then the Representatives are based on the population of the state. So the smallest state (Wyoming) has 3 electoral votes (2 Senators + 1 Representative), and the largest state (California) has 55 electoral votes. Washington DC is a special case...they get 3 electoral votes. They don't have any Representatives or Senators (since it is the Federal City), but a Constitutional Amendment gives them however many electoral votes they would be entitled to if they were a state, but not more than the smallest state. Thus, with a population just a little bigger then Wyomning, it gets 3 votes.

So each state has its own Presidential election, but people aren't voting for the President, they are voting for the Electors that will represent the state in the Electoral College. All except 2 states have a winner takes all system, where whoever wins that state gets all the electoral votes for the state. Maine and Nebraska have a system where there are 2 at-large votes and then 1 vote goes to whoever wins each Congressional district. If I'm not mistaken, Nebraska gave 1 electoral vote to Obama and 4 to McCain in this recent election. So anyway, for someone to become President, they have to get the majority of the electoral votes, which is 270 or more. So technically, Obama was not officially elected president by the Electoral College until last week. But since most states have laws requiring the Electors to vote for who they say they will vote for, and because the media can tally things up really quick, we knew he would win since Election Day.

Now usually whoever wins the most votes overall wins the Electoral vote. But this was not the case in 2000. Gore won the large states by a lot, but Bush won a lot of the smaller states by just a little bit. Then there was the whole deal about Florida...their election got screwed up, and unfortunately neither Bush or Gore had 270 electoral votes without Florida. So we were in limbo for weeks while they argued over how many times to re-count, until finally the Supreme Court stepped in in the infamous Bush v. Gore case and stopped the re-count with Bush ahead, so he became the president.
 
NYGymfan you must be a jedi genius. Seriously.

Anyway, why do you all hate Bush so much? He's a numpty in every sense of the word but you voted him in!

LOL, yeah, I am kinda smart haha.

And many people did not start to dislike Bush until after he was elected in 2000. And then in 2004, despite widespread dislike of Bush, he won because John Kerry wasn't a very strong candidate and didn't win over many of the swing voters. In fact both houses of Congress still had a Republican majority in 2004, so enough people were satisfied enough with the job that was being done to vote for him and his party. The voter revolt didn't really start until the 2006 mid-term elections, when the Republicans lost their majority in both houses of Congress. And then 2008 was not exactly a close election by any means, although not exactly a landslide either. Probably the significant thing in 2008 was Obama's Electoral College landslide, which was due to his strategic campaigning and his ability to win "swing states".

So non-AMericans are probably wondering what is a "swing state"? Well, "big city" states like NY and California lean heavily to the Democratic side, and states down south and in the midwest that are more "country" usually lean towards the Republicans. So candidates often don't spend much time in those states since they are guaranteed to win or lose them pretty much. The swing states are the ones which can go either way, and the ones where the campaigning happens most. Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are important swing states because they have a lot of Electoral votes. Also a lot of states that were not swing states in the past were in this election, and many of them flipped sides for the first time in a long time. Most notable were Virginia and North Carolina which gave Obama 28 electoral votes.

Can you all tell US History was like my favorite class ever?? :-D
 
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Also a lot of states that were not swing states in the past were in this election, and many of them flipped sides for the first time in a long time. Most notable were Virginia and North Carolina which gave Obama 28 electoral votes.

Indiana too!

Anyway, my school was just on a 4.3 grading scale (4.3= A+, 4.0= A), and bonus is calculated by some weird formula that multiplies something and then divides something and works out to boost your GPA by about .02 per class per year. I still can't believe that someone with absolutely no honors classes ended up in the top 1% of my class just because she had so many A+s compared to the AP kids with "only As" and that miniscule weight.
 
Indiana too!

Anyway, my school was just on a 4.3 grading scale (4.3= A+, 4.0= A), and bonus is calculated by some weird formula that multiplies something and then divides something and works out to boost your GPA by about .02 per class per year. I still can't believe that someone with absolutely no honors classes ended up in the top 1% of my class just because she had so many A+s compared to the AP kids with "only As" and that miniscule weight.

Wow, thats crazy. But yeah, AP weighting gives us quite an advantage. This one girl I know with straight A+'s but no AP/honors classes ranked 11 out of 495 last year. And the top two in last years class were seperated GPA-wise by a fraction of a point...#1's elective was AP Stats and #2's was band. This led to accusations that the school discriminates against musically talented students :rolleyes:.
 
I get my class rank at the end of January. It's pretty much pointless because its only after one semester and one set of midterms for us. My rank in the beginning of freshman year might be drastically different by the end of senior year when I can take AP's and such.
We have "quality points" which I guess is like weighted classes. I'm in all honors classes except for comp. app./fine arts which is a required class for freshman that is not tracked.
What I don't like about that is that I'm in Honors Bio and Honors Algebra 2 and there are some people in my grade who are in Hon. Concept Physics and Hon. Algebra 1 which are obviously much each than Bio & algebra 2, but their classes are weighted the same as mine!

A side note is that i'll be able to vote in 2012.
 
You get ranked! So everyone knows who else is failing?!

Never happens here, our exam results aren't even published publicly. The school gets them sent to them and we get them sent to us.

That's harsh.
 
Our class rank only showed up on our transcript; it wasn't publicized unless you chose to tell everyone where you were. At the bottom of my report card, I would get an unweighted GPA, a weighted GPA, and then a rank X of 500ish. At my school, the only time that you would learn someone else's rank is at the end of senior year because the top 30 students were recognized in a banquet and could honor their favorite teacher.
 
Not all schools in the US rank. Mine doesn't. I know roughly where I was though.

We don't have honors classes and some IB classes are weighted, some aren't. They have some thing about weighting it in the exam year or something. I doubt it matters. Colleges are pretty good about picking up the idiosyncrasies of different grading systems.
 
At the end of the year our school has Honor Court where the top 10% of the senior class gets to dress up in formals and they elect and honor king and honor queen. They hand out Honor D's to the students who have been respectful or something like that and the seniors get awarded lots of different scholarships. There has always been a little bit of drama about those who didn't take honors classes, or some who take honors classes but got a consumption ticket, or someone who got a consumption ticket when they were freshmen and have revamped their life since.

No worries for me though, I'm one of the 4 tied for #1 in the class!

And I got my official acceptance to Michigan Tech today!
 
I survived my senior year! Graduation tomorrow! Then my whole summer will be open for work, work, and more work. Woot!
 
That's great! Our last day isn't til next Friday, but we pretty much just watch movies. We graduate a week from Saturday. And I'm working too. And my bf coerced me into doing his cross country workouts with him (he has to do sprints with me and seriously consider doing track in the spring)
 

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