Dilution for Dummies

Wikipedia, that ever-reliable source of quasi-factual information, says that "dilution" may refer to reducing the concentration of a chemical. Since I've performed nine chemistry laboratory experiments in the past five weeks, I'd say I have a pretty good idea what dilution is and how it is achieved.

Suppose you have 1 mL of a .01 M solution of NaOH in a beaker. Then you pipette in 9 mL of deionized water. Now you have a .001 M solution of NaOH. Ta-da! Dilution in action! The NaOH solution was more concentrated before, and now it's less concentrated!

WAIT! Since the solution is now less concentrated, that means it's weaker. The dilution of the solution has reduced its ability to pack a punch.

Now's the part where I tell you that this post isn't actually about chemistry. I don't know if you saw this article in the New York Times today, but I did. And it SHOCKED me. According to the Times,

In top suburban schools across the country, the valedictorian, a beloved tradition, is rapidly losing its singular meaning as administrators dispense the title to every straight-A student rather than try to choose the best among them.

The article goes on to document schools in which there are ten, twenty, even THIRTY valedictorians per class. Okay, so a third of your graduating class gets to call themselves "the best." But what does that even mean, when there are so many others? At the end of the day, the once-coveted valedictory distinction has been reduced to a hollow, meaningless accolade.

In other words, the value of being a valedictorian at these schools has been diluted. Diluted to the point of meaninglessness.

This alarming overabundance of valedictorians seems to be part of a larger trend in education. The need to confer "best-ness" upon students who are simply mediocre, whether it's by re-centering the SAT for the zillionth time, by expanding the roster of valedictorians, or simply by average, run-of-the-mill grade inflation, is wreaking serious havoc on people's ability to succeed after school.

On the phone last night, my brother and I tried to unearth the roots of the (relatively mild but definitely real) quarterlife crisis each has experienced in our mid-twenties. A lot of it seemed to stem from our perception during college of what the real world would be like. We spent our time in school preparing for what we wanted to do afterward. We had always been told by our teachers, our parents, by the American Dream itself, that we could do anything we put our minds to. You can be THE BEST. Look at our GPAs! Look at our SAT scores! Look at our great accomplishments during college!

What we had never been told about the real world was that in addition to pursuing those things that you WANT to do, and that you had been trained and encouraged to pursue for years, there are other things that you HAVE to do. There are certain baseline, required activities that must be attended to, or your life becomes unsustainable. If you don't buy groceries, you don't eat. Or on a grander scale, if you don't set out some long-term goals and instead just live day-to-day, you're going to end up 30 years old without any stability, relationship prospects, money, or a future.

Now that I'm back in school, I have firsthand evidence that the illusion of perfection continues to be perpetuated in today's educational system. Case in point: last semester's statistics class. I put less effort into that class than any of my other three. I learned practically nothing about statistics.

Yet my grade for the semester was an A-plus. And like the valedictorians in the Times article, I was one of many A-pluses in the class. So what does my A-plus even mean? Does it mean I learned statistics? No. Does it mean I did better than the other kids in the class? No. All it means is that I get to wallow in the diluted illusion of my own perfection for a little longer.