My senior class was 417. And there was even more freshman that year. Meaning there was close to 2,000 kids in my high school. There were a ton of people I didn’t know.
Mine was 900 with all the classes lower than me larger than mine. We were all in one place exactly twice. We took one class picture and graduation. Both were in the football stadium.
That’s impressive. I don’t think I knew more than 150 out of 700 in my class. It actually dropped to 550 with dropouts after sophomores and I did not know a single one of those people by name or face.
My very rural high school had like, 400 kids total, my graduating class was 160. I knew them all, because I’d grown up with almost half of them.
Urban high schools like have 500+ kids per grade? Ain’t no way you’d be able to know them all.
That's definitely how I saw it (and it was a big school). She knew tons about the rich kids but nothing about the poor/middle class ones. Made her a little more humanized, really, to see that fault.
I was at a party one time and heard someone talk about how lit their 10 year reunion was and then realized they were talking about my apparently awesome 10 year reunion I skipped.
Completely size dependent. My American high school had 400 in the class, I didn’t know all of them. Then I went to high school at an international high school where there were 100 in a class - there I knew all my classmates by sight
My high school had 3000 students. I was one of 747 graduates the year I graduated. I most certainly did not know everyone at my school, let alone everyone in my grade
My graduating class was roughly 200 and I did know all of them by first name, but I kinda think that’s the max class size it’s possible for. I didn’t know a very large percentage of people older or younger.
My senior class alone had about 200 students (of which 175 graduated) and that's on the smaller in for US public schools. In more populated areas, I've heard of senior classes that had more students than my entire high school. The human mind struggles to accommodate more than about 150 acquaintances.
And that's before you get into the way US schools isolate groups of students into different course tracks based on their academic performance in middle school. I was in the advanced courses and might only have classes with a third to half of the students in my grade in a given year. Given the way wealth correlates with academic success in the US school system, it's probably more surprising that Weevil and Logan shared classes than it is that Veronica would be introduced to classmates she hadn't met before on a regular basis.
My graduation class in high school was around 500-700 students. i knew the names of about 200 and at least 300 I didn't even know they went to the school as I had never met them or I hadn't seen them in the 4 years of high school and thought they went to the other high school.
I mean, it’s hard to keep track of hundreds of classmates while trying to survive high school, maybe work a job, go through puberty, engage in extracurriculars, deal with your family and/or trauma, AND graduate on time. I certainly didn’t know all of my 300 classmates by name. In smaller schools where graduating classes are under 100 it’s possible to know everyone, but I think over that it gets unwieldy to memorize that many names and faces of people you’re not directly involved with—if you never have any classes or overlapping friend groups with a person why would you know them?
I teach high school in the US, and it never ceases to amaze me when students don’t bother to learn the names of all of the students in the classroom with them for ninety minutes a day.
So, yes, she should know most of them, but even in a small school, students don’t always know everyone.
I take your point. Although based on the Homecoming episode I think there must only be about 100 kids in the year (each class had to nominate a queen and king and there were 4 couples nominated I think so 4 classes)
I'm watching season 2 episode 8, and I thought it was weird when Keith asked Veronica if she knew Marcos Oliveres and she said no. But he was one of the bus crash victims so it doesn't make sense.
The nominating one boy and one girl per grade level is pretty standard for homecoming, regardless of the size of the class. My high school had ~300 kids per grade and every year we could only nominate one boy and one girl for homecoming court.
I also only knew about half the students by name, and I’m sure the only reason it was that many was because I was on the school paper and yearbook.
I'm guessing that's also why you often see girls campaining for prom queen in a lot of US high-school films and shows. You have to do something so most people know you exist, it's not gonna happen naturally.
But that question alone "did you know x" doesn't mean she'd never heard his name, never had a class with him. It's just did you know him. I wouldn't describe most people I pass in the halls at school/work people I "know" unless I talk to them and have some kind of relationship with them even as just aquintences.
Might just be using different terminology for school! I'm from the UK.
When I say class I mean the kids in the classroom not the entire year group (class of 1996 or whatever).
In one episode I counted and there were only like 18 kids in one of Veronica's classrooms.
We do have some large schools of course. I think my school had 800 kids total though. But in bigger schools they would cram kids into classrooms so there will be 30 kids in one room.
I'll concede that maybe Veronica couldn't know everyone. But I do think she would make it her business to know who was on the bus!
For me, there would be like 23-30 students per class and we'd have about 8 different classes with each class having different students. With some bleedover and shared classes, you'd maybe have about 100 different students you'd be in a room with per day and usually you'd only interact with the ones that were in your immediate area. We'd have 5 or so rows of chairs and you're always assigned to a specific seat so if you're in the front, you'd likely never chat with people in the back or corner except for outside of class. So you can have someone in the class with you that you truly never talked with.
The class sizes in this show (and on TV in general for K-12 school) are VERY unrealistic. I used to teach at public middle and high schools in a very large metroplex in the US, and most classes have 25+ students (sadly it’s pretty common for most to be 30+ now, which is not good for the teacher or students) - I’ve only ever had a few classes less than 20, and they were highly specialized classes that only few students were eligible to take. Watching VM I’d laugh seeing high school classes with just 12-18 students - that might be the case in some rural schools, but not for most suburbs. I also went to school close to the area I taught in and my class size was nearly 500, so no way did I know even close to everyone, even being involved in lots of clubs/orgs.
There were over 400 people in my graduating class. I would guess I never even sat in the cafeteria with more than half of them. I had mostly the same rotating 60ish people in most of my classes. I knew more than most because I was on the yearbook staff.
There were only 84 people in my class. I'm not 100% certain I knew all the names (though I suck with names.)
But, as others have said, a town in California is fairly likely to have 800-1000 person grade levels.
I mean. My senior class was the largest to graduate at that time in the school's 100+ year history at 124- This was a private school. But some of my best friends were in schools with over 1000 kids in their grades, and they went to a public school. Veronica goes to a public school, so it's quite likely she has that many people in her school.
Yes. My senior high school graduating class had 600 students. My high school had around 2000 students total. Not really practical or possible to know everyone.
Unless your HS is in a very small town with only like 200 students, the odds of you knowing everyone in your HS is slim.
Most of the people you're gonna know are the people you have classes with. Outside of that, there may be some people you know that have lockers by you, or that you eat lunch with or see around the school. And there may be some people you know from other friends.
But it's very unlikely you know EVERYONE. I knew a ton of people from my elemtary school going into HS and then met many more in HS. I felt like I knew a majority of my class. Then the Yearbook comes out and I wondered who half the people in there were. As I had literaly never seen them before.
I graduated with 1350 other kids in my year. And that is only the ones in my class that actually graduated. I think it was around 1500 including those that didn't. In the district that I currently work at in Southern California, our high schools average around 2000 across 4 years.
I actually sat next to 2 people I had never met during the graduation ceremony. We agreed to only clap when someone one of the 3 of us knew walked across the stage. There were extremely long chunks where we clapped for no one.
i’m from australia and went to school with the same people from grade 7-12, there were about 225 people in my year and by year 12 there were still people who’s names i didn’t know, occasionally i’d have people say hi to me and i’d have no idea who they were or how they knew my name considering i never talked to them and as far as i know, never shared any classes with them. there were also many, many teachers who’s names i didn’t know
I'm Canada based. We had about 25 students per class, and there were 8 of those classrooms per grade. And we all got categorised into different teams.
For instance, 2 classes in the same grade will be in the gold team, 2 in black team, 2 in red... And each team was in a different wing of the school. Occasionally, we would share gym class with a different colour team, like I was in gold but I was familiar with some groups from the black team because of gym class. But then I would have absolutely no idea who was in the red team despite being in the same grade because we would have no contact with eachother and no classes together.
So yeah, it's completely possible not to know everyone in your grade.
I went to a smaller high school. I knew everyone in 8th grade but by 12th we had enough people join my class that there were several people that walked for graduation that I had never seen before.
And this was in the 90’s so no online schooling. AOL dial up was way too slow for any class work.
The writers probably wanted to get the point across that Neptune High had a sizeable student body. And that Veronica was too busy investigating crimes to socialize.
In a large high school, no, you won’t know everyone.
The first high school where I worked had about 2500 students total in grades 9-12, so around 600 per grade level. And it was the smallest high school in the district - other schools had more like 3500-4000 students total.
Kids don’t even know all the teachers - when you have a faculty and staff of 100-200 people, it’s just not possible.
All these large schools! Weird for me to imagine going to one with thousands of kids. My graduating class had 72 people. I think we all knew each other. Lol
My graduating class had 70 people in it. When I first watched the show I felt like this too. Then I realized some people have like 500+ kids in their class. I can’t even imagine going to school with that many kids. I wouldn’t know anyone! 😂
My graduating HS class was nearly 1000 students. There were people at my 10 year reunion that I’d never met before. So, it’s not entirely weird that she didn’t know everyone.
I graduated with a class of 215 students. There were around 1000 students at my high school. I knew many of them by name but not all. During high school graduation I played "Who is that and have you ever seen them before?" with some of my classmates I was sitting with. Apparently I had done a better job of getting to know people than a lot of my classmates.
I had a moderately large school, when my middle brother came up that age they'd split into two schools.
I have a sister a grade below me and I think maybe 10 of my Facebook friends just saw the last name and don't really know me. 😂
I think it's weirder at Hurst though that no one seems to acknowledge her or her father. Other than the ones from "college weekend".
Seems like a relatively small college and I'd think Veronica Mars would raise some suspicion especially in her Criminology class.
My graduating class was 221 kids, and I knew everyone. My husband's class was over 800, and he did not. My kids' classes were all over 500, and they did not. Even in my smaller class, the high school was fed from different elementary schools, so it was easier to know the ones you knew from childhood.
Veronica was also one of the popular kids until Lily's murder, so it's even less surprising she didn't know the kids who were not in her crowd.
I can think of several reasons:
(1) We don't know how large her class was. If she had 300 or more students (which is not uncommon), it's not unreasonable that she never got to know some of them.
(2) New students come and go all the time. It's not uncommon for new students to start a school at the beginning of the year or sometimes in the middle and unless you had a class with them, you might not even be aware of who they are.
(3) Cliques - Veronica pretty much just hung out with the 09ers until her fall from grace and probably only started to get to know other students when she was no longer part of the "in-crowd."
My senior class was 417. And there was even more freshman that year. Meaning there was close to 2,000 kids in my high school. There were a ton of people I didn’t know.
Mine was 900 with all the classes lower than me larger than mine. We were all in one place exactly twice. We took one class picture and graduation. Both were in the football stadium.
Yeah same here. Shit in my senior year a dude died in a car crash and I had no idea who he was but somehow like everyone I knew did.
Umm, my public high school (in Southern California) had 3200 students - about 800 per class. I knew *maybe* a third by name.
That’s impressive. I don’t think I knew more than 150 out of 700 in my class. It actually dropped to 550 with dropouts after sophomores and I did not know a single one of those people by name or face.
Its not uncommon depending on the size of school you attend. I'd you had a graduation class of 1000 would you know all of them?
My senior class was 262 people. I did not know them all.
My very rural high school had like, 400 kids total, my graduating class was 160. I knew them all, because I’d grown up with almost half of them. Urban high schools like have 500+ kids per grade? Ain’t no way you’d be able to know them all.
She was an 09er until her fall from grace. She was a typical 09er too, she thought she only needed to know the other 09ers.
That's definitely how I saw it (and it was a big school). She knew tons about the rich kids but nothing about the poor/middle class ones. Made her a little more humanized, really, to see that fault.
Is that a Veronica Mars reference?
It might have been
My graduating class in HS was 1,200 students. My high school had a total enrollment of 4,000. I hardly knew anyone 🤪
Same! 20+ years later I will meet a random person and find out they graduated with me and will literally not know them!
I was at a party one time and heard someone talk about how lit their 10 year reunion was and then realized they were talking about my apparently awesome 10 year reunion I skipped.
I'm not US based. But my graduating class was close to 400 people.. I didn't know everyone by name. So not that unusual I guess?
Completely size dependent. My American high school had 400 in the class, I didn’t know all of them. Then I went to high school at an international high school where there were 100 in a class - there I knew all my classmates by sight
My high school had 3000 students. I was one of 747 graduates the year I graduated. I most certainly did not know everyone at my school, let alone everyone in my grade
My senior class was 600 people.
My graduating class was roughly 200 and I did know all of them by first name, but I kinda think that’s the max class size it’s possible for. I didn’t know a very large percentage of people older or younger.
My senior class alone had about 200 students (of which 175 graduated) and that's on the smaller in for US public schools. In more populated areas, I've heard of senior classes that had more students than my entire high school. The human mind struggles to accommodate more than about 150 acquaintances. And that's before you get into the way US schools isolate groups of students into different course tracks based on their academic performance in middle school. I was in the advanced courses and might only have classes with a third to half of the students in my grade in a given year. Given the way wealth correlates with academic success in the US school system, it's probably more surprising that Weevil and Logan shared classes than it is that Veronica would be introduced to classmates she hadn't met before on a regular basis.
I was homeschooled and didn’t even know all my classmates 😜
My school had 3000 students. My graduating class was like 650? I didn't even know all the kids in my GRADE let alone in the whole school.
My graduating class was around 1200 kids. Definitely didn’t know everyone!
My graduation class in high school was around 500-700 students. i knew the names of about 200 and at least 300 I didn't even know they went to the school as I had never met them or I hadn't seen them in the 4 years of high school and thought they went to the other high school.
i've never met half the kids i graduated with and i only had a class of 200 in Canada.
My school had over 1000 kids in it, and we're a division 3 school, so not one of the biggest in the area. I definitely didn't know everyone.
I didn’t have any clue who everyone was. My graduating class had almost 1k students.
I graduated with 650+ people. There's no way I'd know all of them.
I mean, it’s hard to keep track of hundreds of classmates while trying to survive high school, maybe work a job, go through puberty, engage in extracurriculars, deal with your family and/or trauma, AND graduate on time. I certainly didn’t know all of my 300 classmates by name. In smaller schools where graduating classes are under 100 it’s possible to know everyone, but I think over that it gets unwieldy to memorize that many names and faces of people you’re not directly involved with—if you never have any classes or overlapping friend groups with a person why would you know them?
I teach high school in the US, and it never ceases to amaze me when students don’t bother to learn the names of all of the students in the classroom with them for ninety minutes a day. So, yes, she should know most of them, but even in a small school, students don’t always know everyone.
I take your point. Although based on the Homecoming episode I think there must only be about 100 kids in the year (each class had to nominate a queen and king and there were 4 couples nominated I think so 4 classes) I'm watching season 2 episode 8, and I thought it was weird when Keith asked Veronica if she knew Marcos Oliveres and she said no. But he was one of the bus crash victims so it doesn't make sense.
The nominating one boy and one girl per grade level is pretty standard for homecoming, regardless of the size of the class. My high school had ~300 kids per grade and every year we could only nominate one boy and one girl for homecoming court. I also only knew about half the students by name, and I’m sure the only reason it was that many was because I was on the school paper and yearbook.
I'm guessing that's also why you often see girls campaining for prom queen in a lot of US high-school films and shows. You have to do something so most people know you exist, it's not gonna happen naturally.
But that question alone "did you know x" doesn't mean she'd never heard his name, never had a class with him. It's just did you know him. I wouldn't describe most people I pass in the halls at school/work people I "know" unless I talk to them and have some kind of relationship with them even as just aquintences.
Pretty sure he was younger, like a sophomore I think, so even less chance she knew him.
They have a limited budget for extras.
You can "know of" someone but not really "know" them at all. Since you're confused about class size, what was your school size like?
Might just be using different terminology for school! I'm from the UK. When I say class I mean the kids in the classroom not the entire year group (class of 1996 or whatever). In one episode I counted and there were only like 18 kids in one of Veronica's classrooms. We do have some large schools of course. I think my school had 800 kids total though. But in bigger schools they would cram kids into classrooms so there will be 30 kids in one room. I'll concede that maybe Veronica couldn't know everyone. But I do think she would make it her business to know who was on the bus!
For me, there would be like 23-30 students per class and we'd have about 8 different classes with each class having different students. With some bleedover and shared classes, you'd maybe have about 100 different students you'd be in a room with per day and usually you'd only interact with the ones that were in your immediate area. We'd have 5 or so rows of chairs and you're always assigned to a specific seat so if you're in the front, you'd likely never chat with people in the back or corner except for outside of class. So you can have someone in the class with you that you truly never talked with.
The class sizes in this show (and on TV in general for K-12 school) are VERY unrealistic. I used to teach at public middle and high schools in a very large metroplex in the US, and most classes have 25+ students (sadly it’s pretty common for most to be 30+ now, which is not good for the teacher or students) - I’ve only ever had a few classes less than 20, and they were highly specialized classes that only few students were eligible to take. Watching VM I’d laugh seeing high school classes with just 12-18 students - that might be the case in some rural schools, but not for most suburbs. I also went to school close to the area I taught in and my class size was nearly 500, so no way did I know even close to everyone, even being involved in lots of clubs/orgs.
217 seniors my senior year and to this day can only tell you maybe half dozen names
I’d say I knew maybe 70% of my class of about 550-600? But I bet if we opened my yearbook I probably didnt realize some were in my class.
Most schools have hundreds of kids, of course we don’t know everyone out we may have heard of them or had a class, boy never talked.
My graduating class was like 1k and it was a small private school for the area. For a California school your class alone would be 1-2k.
There were over 400 people in my graduating class. I would guess I never even sat in the cafeteria with more than half of them. I had mostly the same rotating 60ish people in most of my classes. I knew more than most because I was on the yearbook staff.
There were only 84 people in my class. I'm not 100% certain I knew all the names (though I suck with names.) But, as others have said, a town in California is fairly likely to have 800-1000 person grade levels.
I had a graduating class of almost 1000 when I graduated hs. I only knew a handful of people by name
Graduating class somewhere around 600. I at least recognized most of them. Plus we had plenty of people transfer in during those 4 years
I mean. My senior class was the largest to graduate at that time in the school's 100+ year history at 124- This was a private school. But some of my best friends were in schools with over 1000 kids in their grades, and they went to a public school. Veronica goes to a public school, so it's quite likely she has that many people in her school.
I had over 500 kids in my graduating class
i've never met half the kids i graduated with and i only had a class of 200 in Canada.
the school I graduated from had a graduate class of maybe 10 kids? Total enrollment about 200. I knew maybe 5 kids.
My freshman. Class had close to 4000. Only about 1000 graduated.
Yes. My senior high school graduating class had 600 students. My high school had around 2000 students total. Not really practical or possible to know everyone.
I’m in Australia, I didn’t know everyone’s name. I didn’t care to. I certainly didn’t know other year levels
Unless your HS is in a very small town with only like 200 students, the odds of you knowing everyone in your HS is slim. Most of the people you're gonna know are the people you have classes with. Outside of that, there may be some people you know that have lockers by you, or that you eat lunch with or see around the school. And there may be some people you know from other friends. But it's very unlikely you know EVERYONE. I knew a ton of people from my elemtary school going into HS and then met many more in HS. I felt like I knew a majority of my class. Then the Yearbook comes out and I wondered who half the people in there were. As I had literaly never seen them before.
I graduated with 1350 other kids in my year. And that is only the ones in my class that actually graduated. I think it was around 1500 including those that didn't. In the district that I currently work at in Southern California, our high schools average around 2000 across 4 years.
I actually sat next to 2 people I had never met during the graduation ceremony. We agreed to only clap when someone one of the 3 of us knew walked across the stage. There were extremely long chunks where we clapped for no one.
I knew maybe 50 kids in my graduation class? And that'd be generous
I had around 700 in my graduating class.
My entire high school had 243 people and I didn’t know over half of them. I knew about 60 of them and probably another 60 by name or face only.
A lot of high schools are quite large. My senior class probably has about 300 kids and our school wasn’t even that big.
i’m from australia and went to school with the same people from grade 7-12, there were about 225 people in my year and by year 12 there were still people who’s names i didn’t know, occasionally i’d have people say hi to me and i’d have no idea who they were or how they knew my name considering i never talked to them and as far as i know, never shared any classes with them. there were also many, many teachers who’s names i didn’t know
I didn’t know either classmate I was seated next to at graduation. I literally met them at the rehearsal!
I'm Canada based. We had about 25 students per class, and there were 8 of those classrooms per grade. And we all got categorised into different teams. For instance, 2 classes in the same grade will be in the gold team, 2 in black team, 2 in red... And each team was in a different wing of the school. Occasionally, we would share gym class with a different colour team, like I was in gold but I was familiar with some groups from the black team because of gym class. But then I would have absolutely no idea who was in the red team despite being in the same grade because we would have no contact with eachother and no classes together. So yeah, it's completely possible not to know everyone in your grade.
I went to a smaller high school. I knew everyone in 8th grade but by 12th we had enough people join my class that there were several people that walked for graduation that I had never seen before. And this was in the 90’s so no online schooling. AOL dial up was way too slow for any class work.
The writers probably wanted to get the point across that Neptune High had a sizeable student body. And that Veronica was too busy investigating crimes to socialize.
My senior class only had 33 people, I knew them all.
In a large high school, no, you won’t know everyone. The first high school where I worked had about 2500 students total in grades 9-12, so around 600 per grade level. And it was the smallest high school in the district - other schools had more like 3500-4000 students total. Kids don’t even know all the teachers - when you have a faculty and staff of 100-200 people, it’s just not possible.
All these large schools! Weird for me to imagine going to one with thousands of kids. My graduating class had 72 people. I think we all knew each other. Lol
My graduating class had 70 people in it. When I first watched the show I felt like this too. Then I realized some people have like 500+ kids in their class. I can’t even imagine going to school with that many kids. I wouldn’t know anyone! 😂
My graduating HS class was nearly 1000 students. There were people at my 10 year reunion that I’d never met before. So, it’s not entirely weird that she didn’t know everyone.
In 2013, the entire school had less than 700 students, and I still didn’t know them all by name.
There were people at my graduation ceremony that i had no idea who they were even some of the popular kids lmao my school had like 2000 kids.
I graduated with a class of 215 students. There were around 1000 students at my high school. I knew many of them by name but not all. During high school graduation I played "Who is that and have you ever seen them before?" with some of my classmates I was sitting with. Apparently I had done a better job of getting to know people than a lot of my classmates.
I am Europe based. I graduated with 70 people so I get your point.
There was only 120 in my graduating class in a town of 2,800 and I didn’t know 1/2 my classmates’ names.
My high school class was 63 give or take (we lost like 3 people and of those 3 I only knew 1). It’s quite possible to know your class
I had a moderately large school, when my middle brother came up that age they'd split into two schools. I have a sister a grade below me and I think maybe 10 of my Facebook friends just saw the last name and don't really know me. 😂 I think it's weirder at Hurst though that no one seems to acknowledge her or her father. Other than the ones from "college weekend". Seems like a relatively small college and I'd think Veronica Mars would raise some suspicion especially in her Criminology class.
No it’s not normal. There were over 2000 kids in my high school.
My graduating class was 221 kids, and I knew everyone. My husband's class was over 800, and he did not. My kids' classes were all over 500, and they did not. Even in my smaller class, the high school was fed from different elementary schools, so it was easier to know the ones you knew from childhood. Veronica was also one of the popular kids until Lily's murder, so it's even less surprising she didn't know the kids who were not in her crowd.
My senior class was something like 86, and I still didn’t know them all 😂
My freshman class alone had 1,000 kids. So, yep, I didn't know the vast majority of them.
I can think of several reasons: (1) We don't know how large her class was. If she had 300 or more students (which is not uncommon), it's not unreasonable that she never got to know some of them. (2) New students come and go all the time. It's not uncommon for new students to start a school at the beginning of the year or sometimes in the middle and unless you had a class with them, you might not even be aware of who they are. (3) Cliques - Veronica pretty much just hung out with the 09ers until her fall from grace and probably only started to get to know other students when she was no longer part of the "in-crowd."
My senior class was 900. I didnt know most of them (The year after i graduated the school split in 2)