To the Editor:

Re “The Joy of Graduating: The Frenzied Battle to Be Valedictorian Is Giving Some Administrators Pause” (regional sections, June 29):

As a current medical student and a recent graduate of Yale, I question whether this numbers game is worth the pressure it places on teenagers.

I attended the Fieldston School in Riverdale in the Bronx. Fieldston did not offer Advance Placement courses, calculate grade point averages or rank students. Instead of having the school choose some overachiever to speak at our high school graduation, the class elected three students to give speeches, regardless of their grades or what college they would be attending in the fall.

My high school experience was enjoyable and certainly less stressful than that of the students mentioned in the article because I did not measure my self-worth and define myself by a number. Without A.P. courses, I was able to take classes I was genuinely interested in, and my teachers had flexibility with the curriculum instead of being obligated to “teach to the test.”

When I entered Yale, I soon encountered students with 10 or 12 A.P. credits, while I had one (I took the Calculus BC A.P. test independently). Almost everybody in my class at Yale had been a high school valedictorian, while I didn’t even know what my G.P.A. had been.