As for show and prestige, that’s usually what the parents want, so that’s squarely in the "something is wrong" category.
Blind unthinking mimicry drives the educational system. I was in early elementary school when analogies were removed from the SATs. They went from "very important" to disappearing off the face of the earth, only occassionally showing up in two questions at most per standardized test.
all these can be fun but as a kid you are not doing them to have fun, there is constant pressure to win awards and be the best at these. and the list is picked more from appearance on a college application than enjoyment for a child.
this is most american kids now with any ambition of getting into a prestigious school. it will not get you scholarships though.
it is also not mentioning that "academic excellence" in high school has moved from straight As to 6-8 AP exams in a single year, i shit you not.
Same in India.
There is 0.1 to 0.6% chance of getting into any prestigious university depending on the demographic factors of student. This is after extensive filtering in high school.
99% of students spend 6-8 hours in coaching daily for years to get rejected since we follow stack ranking with limited seats.
What's sobering is government tried to increase elite universities but people don't perceive them as such even if they have better infrastructure, faculty, and education without the same low acceptance rate.
That is because even when I attended high school 15 to 20 years ago, letter grades/points were extremely inflated. AP exam scores (and SAT/ACT) are the only objective academic measures.
As an example, I am pretty sure a C was the lowest grade possible to get (translated to a 2 on the point scale). Then a B was a 3, and A was 4. For a class, there was a final numerical score (arbitrarily determined), and an A was something like 93 to 100, B was 85 to 92, and so on.
But that was for the “regular classes”. If you were in an honors class, you got +5 added to your final number grade for the course. And AP class added +10. So if you ended up with 93, you actually got 103 in the class. And so you had an A, but the grade point average was calculated from 103/100*4 = 4.12. And then this grade point average was used to rank you relative to others in the grade for purposes of determining valedictorian.
In any case, as you can see, the whole thing was a joke and anyone who attended class got a C, and anyone who put in half an ounce of effort got an A, and the higher achievers had GPAs higher than 4 on a 4 point scale.
Obviously, colleges are not dumb, so they know the whole grade inflation ruse, and it also continues in many classes. After all, at many colleges, their customers are paying them $30k to $70k per year for that grade.
Very much so. It's a thing even here in my tiny caribbean island for some fields of study.