MY DS16's school/district does not do valedictorian just for this reason. In fact they don't do class 'rank' either. What they do is will give colleges a percentage 'rank".. ie in the top 5%, 10%, 25%. All students who have a 'top' GPA are given awards. There are huge numbers who have GPA's above a 4.0 every year. This is one of the things I think my DS's school does right.
I disagree, since I don't like the idea of discarding information, which is what such "binning" does. If colleges think the 1st and 25th student in a class of 500 are equivalent, they can make their admissions decisions accordingly, but they should get the raw rank. I was 2nd in a class of almost 500. To say only that I was only in the top 25 would have hurt my admissions chances and I think misrepresented my level of accomplishment. (This last sentence does not sound modest, but I don't think my classmates would have said I was the 10th best or 25th best student in the class. I was voted most studious boy
.)
The person ranked 51st out 500 won't like being consigned to the top 25% bin, having just missed the top 10% cutoff.
