Description
Phillips Academy is the oldest incorporated academy in the United States, established in 1778 by Samuel Phillips, Jr. Phillips's uncle founded Phillips Exeter Academy three years later, starting a rivalry that has continued through the centuries. Phillips Academy's endowment stood around $800 million in June 2011, the fourth-highest of any American secondary school. The three secondary schools with higher endowments are: Phillips Exeter ($997 million) the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania, and Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii ($6.8 billion). Andover is subject to the control of a board of trustees, headed by Peter Currie '74, business executive and former Netscape Chief Financial Officer, who took over as president of the Phillips Academy Board of Trustees on July 1, 2012. On November 14, 2012, John G. Palfrey, Jr., Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, was named the 15th Head of School.
Phillips Academy admitted only boys until the school became coeducational in 1973, the year of Phillips Academy's merger with Abbot Academy, a boarding school for girls in downtown Andover. Abbot Academy, founded in 1828, was the first incorporated school for girls in New England. Then-headmaster Theodore Sizer oversaw the merger, and Phillips Academy's move to coeducation is seen as his most important accomplishment.
Andover traditionally educated its students for Yale (and, to a lesser extent, Harvard), but students now matriculate to a wide range of colleges and universities.
In recent years, Andover has sent the largest number of its students to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Penn, Columbia, Princeton, and other top-tier colleges and universities in the United States and abroad.
Among other notable alumni, Andover has educated two American presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, NFL head coach Bill Belichick, Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, Lyman Spitzer, namesake of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, six Medal of Honor recipients, inventor Samuel Morse, and author Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
The school's student-run newspaper, The Phillipian, is the second-oldest secondary school newspaper in the United States, the oldest secondary school newspaper being The Exonian, Phillips Exeter Academy's weekly. The Phillipian was first published on July 28, 1857 has been published regularly since 1878. The Philomathean Society is the oldest high school debate society in the nation, established in 1825.
The school's grading system, a scale of zero to six, is rather unusual. Andover does not rank students, and rather than a four-point GPA scale, Phillips Academy calculates GPA using a six-point system. The Office of the Dean of Studies claims that there is no formal equivalent between the zero-to-six system and a conventional letter-grade system. However, a six is considered outstanding and is (theoretically) rarely awarded, a five is the lowest honors grade, and a two is the lowest passing grade. Grades earned in classes are sometimes weighted at the discretion of the instructor, and the school provides no uniform scale for converting percent scores into grades on the six-point scale. However, most standard-level classes operate using the following score system or a similar derivative:
93-100% = 6; 85-92% = 5; 77-84% = 4; 69-76% = 3; 60-68% = 2; 50-59% = 1; <50% = 0
Andover runs a five-week summer session for approximately 600 students entering grades 8 through 12.
Read more about this topic: Phillips Academy
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“As they are not seen on their way down the streams, it is thought by fishermen that they never return, but waste away and die, clinging to rocks and stumps of trees for an indefinite period; a tragic feature in the scenery of the river bottoms worthy to be remembered with Shakespeare’s description of the sea-floor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)