Jericho High School in Nassau County, Long Island, has 21 seniors who will graduate as valedictorians this year, a rare cluster of perfect GPAs that has forced the school to rethink its own commencement tradition. Thirteen of the students gathered in the school lobby on Tuesday to talk about the honor, while eight others were in Arizona at a prestigious science event they had been admitted to.

The school said all 21 students earned an A-plus in every class they took in high school, with grades of 97 to 100 counting as an A-plus at Jericho. Because the school awards valedictory status based on letter grades rather than numbers, the group reached the top distinction together. With about 300 seniors in the class, the school’s tally means roughly one in seven will graduate as a valedictorian.

That number is unusual even for Jericho, which has built a reputation for high achievement and is ranked the highest among non-magnet, non-charter public schools in the country on a national list of best high schools. But the grading system helps explain how the school got here. By using letter grades instead of numeric rankings, Jericho leaves room for more than one student to reach the top, and this year it produced 21.

For the students, the distinction is less about competition than the paths that got them there. Robert Kravitz, the school’s principal, said the system gives students “some equity and opportunity,” adding that even those who are not taking advanced placement classes can still become scholars. Liv Akiva said she has done projects with some of the classmates who share the honor, and that even when they were not in the same classes they still worked together. “It’s definitely nice to work with them,” she said.

Andrew Han pointed to the classes that helped shape his record, saying courses such as Economics and Government are subjects he has an interest in. He also said colleges value students who challenge themselves academically, and that those students often do well after high school. Han will become a first-year student at Yale this fall, one of the next steps already in motion for a class that has outgrown the usual way of celebrating it.

That is the tension Jericho is now managing: the school cannot have all 21 valedictorians give separate speeches at graduation. Cummings said the students will be placed at the front of the procession into the commencement ceremony, and the school is also creating a video about their accomplishments to share with the community. The adjustment is a practical one, but it also underlines the scale of the moment. Jericho has not just produced a large class of top students; it has produced one so large that the old script no longer fits.