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.
My D's high school fits the profile described by the OP. Like bluemagic's local high school, our school does not do class ranks or valedictorian either. However, they do provide a bell curve distribution with cutoffs at the top 2%, 10%, 25% and so on. A college can quite easily determine if a student is close to 51st or close to 125th in terms of rank.
I would not have considered D to be PG, but much to our pleasant surprise she is well above the cutoff for the top group. On the other hand, we find it a big relief that there is no competition for valedictorian. Kids don't share grades so D doesn't know if she is 1st, 5th, or 10th. As such she is friends with the other top students and they are cooperative rather than cut-throat. This significantly reduces the pressure.
