By Ben Nguyen
It feels like every time I start a new year at Garnet Valley, I’m amazed at the ever-increasing talent of the incoming freshmen. Some come in with high SAT scores right off the bat, others have course loads I wouldn’t touch as a junior (let alone a freshman). What is the cause of this higher breed of competitiveness among incoming classes?
I wouldn’t say that the students of one grade are more intelligent than the other; instead, this behavior appears to be a result of an increased drive for academic success. Our school district has supported these ambitious endeavors, facilitating it by their (optional) increased rigor of coursework in middle school. They offer Algebra 2/Trig to 8th graders when it previously a 9th-grade course. Regardless of whether younger students are relatively more intelligent than their older upperclassmen, it cannot be denied that the overall classes a student has to take at GVHS have gotten more rigorous as time has gone on.
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