NYP: Florida teen graduates high school with a mind-bending 11.99 GPA; prompts district to reexamine policy
Man, I thought I was a big deal when I was rocking a 3.8 GPA my senior year. Meanwhile, this ubernerd is taking 44 AP classes, and college courses, completing their associate’s degree before finishing up high school, and I guess solved the meme-like riddle of how people can accumulate four years experience for entry level jobs.
Seriously though, when I was in high school, the defining standard of excellence was how close to a 4.0 GPA one could get to. And in only the rarest of instances, you’d see kids nail that 4.0 or even exceed it by like 0.1 or 0.2 because of the two AP courses they took their senior year, and then they’re the class valedictorian.
But over the #SZNs of watching #TRYHARDs race across America at who can outdo others, we’ve witnessed ultra-competitive #TRYHARD students start notching GPAs that have crossed into the 5’s and even 7’s, en route to them being accepted into 162 colleges with accumulated scholarship offers eclipsing multiple millions of dollars.
And then we have this mensch down in Florida who attended George Steinbrenner High,* who somehow manages to get an astounding 11.99 GPA, and obviously the first question that comes to the minds of most rational observers, other than what a huge fuckin’ nerd, is, hoowwwwww???
*there’s a joke somewhere about how there’s actually a school named after the former, free-spending wheeling & dealing owner of the Yankees but I can’t figure one out
Don’t get me wrong, as obnoxious as the self-promotion and humble-bragging can get, I’m all for kids getting competitive over academics, as opposed to dumb TikTok trends or petty larcenies, because at least these brats might be learning some useful knowledge in their journeys, but hopefully they’re doing it because they want to be smarter, and not because it’s a route for internet notoriety.
Because as impressive as the feat was, I question the motivation behind it if the goal was merely to surpass the #TRYHARDs before them:
noting that [their] top aims were to “become valedictorian” and “break the state GPA record.”
It’s worth mentioning that the Florida state GPA record before this kid was 11.84, so it’s not like this kid had broken into completely uncharted territory. The academic policy was already busted, allowing kids to take questionably high and probably ethically risky course loads at young ages, it’s just that it’s now coming into question because it probably didn’t have the magnitude of spotlight on it previously.
But it does make me wonder if the kid really had the thirst for knowledge to take such a demanding course load, or if it was the equivalent of figuring out what he had to take in order to hit the XBOX achievement, and then going for solely that.
Considering the fact that they’re going to Duke, there’s always the innate possibility that the latter is very much in play.
The funny thing is, one of my knee-jerk reactions to the story was after picking up my jaw after seeing 11.99, was the obvious joke that although everyone might think it’s astounding at first to see such a high GPA, their minority (obviously) parents were probably completely unsold on it, and wondered why they didn’t get a full 12.0 GPA instead. Like, what careless error on their quantum physics scantron did they get wrong that dropped them down to 11.99 and cost them the chance for immortality of 12?
Moving onto the proposed overhaul of school policy, #TRYHARD’s county realized the absurdity of someone being able to get such an astronomical GPA, and although they’re impressed, it sounds like they want to change things to where such shouldn’t be possible again; unsurprisingly, the nerd who just set the bar is all for overhaul, because it would effectively lock their GPA into immortality and basically prevent anyone in history from ever challenging it. It’s like when a heel wrestler aspires to win a championship blet, so they can retire it and be the last guy in history books to hold it.
Either way, the question remains where this kid lands in the annals of #TRYHARDs. The GPA and course load were of couse legendary, but without any background of how many colleges they applied to, how many they were accepted into, and how much scholarship offer money they amassed, we’ll never truly know. But perhaps that’s the point, and much like they’re trying to slam the door on any future challengers to their record, by not disclosing the base counting #TRYHARD stats, we’ll never know where they stand in the rankings of ultimate #TRYHARDs.
Big-brain, 11.99 GPA logic.
