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Philippines
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Summa cum laude

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The recent graduation extravaganza at the state-run University of the Philippines in Diliman, where the school graduated 5,000 students in various disciplines, including a record 54 summa cum laude, during its 108th General Commencement Exercises can make many pretty much jaundiced.

Recognized with them during the university spectacle on June 30 at the University Amphitheater were 437 magna cum laude and 1,173 cum laude students.

They notched an average of 1.20 for the summa, 1.40 for the magna, and 1.75 for the cum during eight continuous semesters in the university—for those who follow the 1.0 to 5.0 grading system, 1.0 being the highest down to 3.0 being the passing grade.

Summa cum laude

While we take an unambiguous pause as we celebrate as well with the graduates—all of them in fact—and their parents and friends, we are reminded rather accordingly by observations, raised wittingly, that there has been what one summa cum laude graduate of the same university described as a “brain boom” and “grade inflation” over the years from teachers which had seemingly depreciated the Latin honors.

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On the same gear, there has been a quick admission that today’s millennials—those born between 1981 and 1996 (22-37 years old) —are contestably getting smarter than their predecessors, seen as one factor for the so-described “brain boom.”

The Latin honors performance gain has been studied by New Zealand intelligence researcher James Robert Flynn, famous for his publications about the continued year-after-year increase in IQ scores throughout the world, now referred to as the Flynn effect.

We also take a particular eye on one graduate of the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, Reycel Hyacinth Bendaña, daughter of a jeepney driver and her school’s valedictorian in 2019, whose commencement address went viral on social media.

She chewed over the idea: “Every graduation, Atenean seniors are told to go ‘down from the hill.’ This year, perhaps it is time to ask why there is even a hill at all … As long as society has not overcome bigger, deeper problems—social discrimination, stark economic inequality and the concentration of political power in the hands of the few—there will always be something better to struggle for.”

Whatever, the 2019 graduates deserve our hand, the young women and men who deserve watching after having stepped out of their school corridors, high in hope they will use their qualifications for their country.

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