You can't sell them, can't delete them and you can't eat them! They are passed on through generations like some precious treasure... I mean WTF?
My legacy family heir is carrying countless diplomas in his inventory and he won't give them up no matter what... crazy hoarder drives me nuts!
There's not enough wall-space in all of The Sims games put together to support those nasty things... and who would want entire house filled with high school diplomas anyway? :/

I just got Generations recently and I was wondering if I'm missing something?
Is this another example of EA's silliness or are there some super secret hidden properties of high school diploma that I'm not aware of?

Any ideas on how to get rid of them would be much appreciated.

Idk either, personally I think generations was a waste of money, there isn't anything much different and it's geared strongly towards toddler to teen (which I hardly play.)

Place the diplomas on a wall.
Shift+Ctrl+C: Enter testingcheatsenabled true into the bar.
I believe it's Shift+Right Click the diploma (You'll have to do them one at a time).
An option called "object" will come up. Click on it and select "delete."
And viola! You don't have those pesky diplomas anymore.

On another note, they are gosh-darn annoying so I feel your pain. I usually just delete them unless they somehow tie into my legacy. :D

Giga - thanks! I usually only use cheats like buydebug, didn't know about this one.

And since posting this yesterday I actually found out something you CAN do with those stinking diplomas (I knew I missed something).
No, you can't sell them, can't delete them (well, not without cheats anyway ) and you can't eat them, but...
you can give them to the kid...
and then the kid can bury them in the sandbox...
and then you can sell the sandbox!
hallelujah!

I do think it's annoying how you can't sell them. I can see EA doing this for the people stupid enough to sell it and then go 'whaaat, you mean it's GONE now? but... I want it back!!'
I don't see why it was needed for sims created in CAS to have random diplomas either. What if that character wasn't supposed have have a school background, eh?

For my last legacy, I hung up the founder's diplomas, and a couple others - considered stashing everyone's in a WA chest somewhere - and ended up doing the cheat to delete them.

This whole high school diploma shenanigans would be much more bearable if they stack in the sims inventory and only take up one slot, but they are considered unique items though there is nothing unique about them, no name of the original owner, no grade, not even a type of school they graduated... :/ what a waste of pixels...

have you tried putting them in the family inventory? atleast that way your sim doesnt have to carry them around and you dont have to put them on the wall.

Only way i have seen to see the info is to hang it on the wall and select view.It will show everything except the grade they made.

That's good to know, I didn't even think of trying it because in the sim's inventory those diplomas are completely generic and on most objects the 'view' option is totally pointless anyway.
It's nice that you can view the diploma on the wall and get some detailed info, but it's ridiculous that there's not even a name on it in the sims inventory, my legacy sim is carrying like ten of them and can't tell which one is his own :/
I guess I'm gonna have to hang them all and view them all just to find the one that belongs to my sim... that is so lame...

One Sim to rule them all, One Sim to hang them,
One Sim to view them all and in the sandbox bury them!

...ok, I'll shut up now...

One doesn't just WALK into the Playground!!! >.>' ...(sorry, had to.)

It's colorful gates are guarded by more than just gnomes... there is evil there that does not sleep... and the Great Llama is ever watchful...

But have you heard nothing that has been said here? The Diploma must be destroyed!
It must be taken deep into the Playground!
And ONE OF YOU must do this!

...ok, now I'm really shutting up.

I don't have any problem with the diploma.

It similar to TS2 University. Since TS3 don't have university ep, EA replace it with high school.

I don't have a problem with the diploma in general, but rather with the way it's implemented.
It's nice that the sim can have a diploma and hang it on the wall for other sims to see, but like I said in the first post, when you play a legacy then after few generations your sim is having too many of them, you can't easily get rid of them like other certificates or rewards your sim gets, in the inventory they take up A LOT of space, having one or two on the wall is fine but twelve? And even if you don't play a legacy, if you want to tell a story of a sim who dropped out of school then you're out of luck... With other trophies you can choose to keep them or to sell them, whatever fits your gameplay.
I was royally annoyed with the diploma, it just wouldn't go away... but now that I know a way to get rid of it, it doesn't mean that I'll always do that, I'm just happy that I have a choice.

Well, as to what's the point of diplomas:

My game has the bug, that all my children I send to grammar school come back before they finish high school. I can't send them back to private school, but I can't send them to the normal school either.
So I just have to wait until they grow up and since they didn't really finish high school, they don't have a diploma.
Well, they grow up anyways, but the thing is they're not able to have a job. All they're able to do is the freelance work.

So I guess, that might be the point of diplomas. Getting a job. Cause my sims can't get one without it.

I can't stand the diplomas. I wish you could sell them. I created a large family, and when most of them moved out, my sim ended up with their diplomas in her inventory. My sim does NOT need 5 diplomas in her inventory.

I used to them on walls and then use cheats to delete them, but it really gets repetetive.

It might be to prevent your sims inventory to collapse on itself when it is empty, creating a tiny black hole in the process.

On a serious note: I wouldnt have a problem with them if we could mount several awards/diplomas above each other on a wall. I dont even bother hanging up those skill diplomas anymore. I never have enough free wallspace.

i'm playing a town that doesnt have a school, so unless i get off my butt and send my teen to private school there will be no diploma. i just started building basements and hanging them on the walls in there untill i read this thread. that was rough on my basement dweller sims, but what are ya gonna do? some good info here.

This might help you. Diplomas are shiftable on their own, but that mod I made fixes it for all the awards. I also tried to make one for mounted fish, but I'm not sure if its fully working yet. I haven't had a chance to check.

Yeah, getting rid of many diplomas one by one may become frustrating... but on my diploma crusade I learned yet another way of deleting them and I think this way is best for removing large numbers at once and you don't need cheats. You can put them all on the wall and then delete the wall and the diplomas will be gone along with it.

Innovative approach.

If one were amiable to using mods though : The "Object Stats" interaction in MasterController can easily delete all the diploma objects off a lot, or out of the entire town if you so choose.

Twallan, so this deletes them out of ALL the town's inventories? Would that free up a lot of lag, or at the least, load times?

Having fewer objects in town will reduce save-file size, and improve load-up time slightly.

Really depends on how many diplomas you have in town. Deleting a hundred objects is rather insignificant really in the overall scheme of things.

^^Though still better than nothing, I would imagine

Finally, I know why objects buried in the sandbox are lost forever.

For me, this whole diploma/graduation thing is a bit skewed. I had one teen that I planned to have drop out of school b/c she hated it since she was little. I had her constantly skipping school and doing things that she liked. She rarely went to school, lol. Unfortunately, the game had her "graduate" anyway! I didn't want her to graduate! I wanted her to drop out. She was an inventer and therefore, didn't need a formal job, lol.