What is academic excellence? It is the ability to achieve success in academic classes such as science, mathematics, and languages.

How is academic excellence determined? It is not only determined by marks, grades, and percentages because you are assuming that 1. each test a student takes is the same 2. each level of experience a student has is the same and 3. each student is the same.

1. The problem with the United States' school system is that not every school have a standard curriculum. Individual schools will select different benchmarks that will determine whether a student is academically successful. Inside each individual school (more often a public school), the teachers choose their own curriculum and what they will teach during each school year. In fact, I am a high school student and I know that all the students at my school talk about which teacher is harder than others and share questions on tests. This problem posed by a "laissez-faire" school system makes tests taught by different teachers for the same subjects range from extremely easy to extremely hard, even though the students are learning about the same subject.

2. No students have the same experience, inside or outside of school. Teachers in American schools vary n difficulty but even more varying are the schools themselves, from inner city public schools to charter schools, to rich private schools. The private schools with their private funding will be able to hire better teachers than an inner city public school. City areas with lower or higher demographics and crime rates also affect the performance of schools, which affect student performance. Now what does this mean? Take for example two students, one from a suburban private school and the other from a poor inner city public school. Each student receives an A for a subject. Now if you look only at the students and their marks, their is no way to tell which student is more academically successful; you might even say that they have equal academic excellence due to the same A mark. However this is untrue. A huge factor is the performance of the teachers of each school. The higher paid schoolteacher from the private school will be giving harder tests and more difficult work. The inner city schoolteacher will face lower performance because many of the students have a lower class background. The schoolteacher then has to set the bar lower. Therefore, the private school student will have to work harder for his/her A than the inner city student.

3. No two students are different. Their test-taking skills will be different, Their ability to handle tests will be different. Studies have shown that left-handed people and right-handed people do not react the same way to their education. Left-handed students tend to have higher verbal and intellectual skills suited to understanding abstract concepts while right-handed students have higher motor and clerical abilities. The SAT show this correlation since it has shown that left-handed students generally score higher than right-handed students. Now does that mean that left-handed students have more academic excellence solely based on their higher SAT scores? No. The SAT assess skills that some students have that are better than other students'. The SAT doesn't assess knowledge on the subject (just ask anyone who's taken an SAT class).

So my final judgment is that academic excellence are based on many, many factors, from your genes to your teachers, from your neighborhood to the society you live in and the laws you live by. Only then can you determine a person's true academic excellence.

every child is born of different genes. every child therefore is unique. one child may be completely different from the other. one may be brilliant at mugging up text bookks and writing exams but the other though more intelligent may not have the ability to do that. no one has the right to judge a student merely on his/her academic excellence. a child's talent may lie elsewhere. for instance thomas edison dropped out of school because he failed his examinations. yet we can sit with a tubelight on in the room only because of him. if he had been judged by his marks he would have been a daft someone worth sweeping office floors only. if sachin tendulkar or leander paes did not recognise their talents in cricket or tennis respectively and relied only on thir academic performance they would probably have been clerks in some office. in a nutshell, a child cannot be judged only on his academic performance. of course it is an important part which decides your future yet it is not the only thing. many things and talents can overcome marks.