Interesting mixture of reactions there :-)
Of course I know more than one student can get an A! I don't think I'm inventing the concept of
grading on a curve which I was first driven to look up when I was trying to understand why all the education blogs were so excited about this newfangled
standards-based grading thing.
More to the point, though, I think it's a mistake for the same work to be used for learning and for summative assessment. Suppose I am a rational student and I am given an assignment that I could approach in two different ways. I'm confident that if I do X, I can do it well; it exercises skills I already have (the teacher may or may not know this). If I do Y, I don't know whether I'll do well - it'll take me outside my comfort zone (the teacher may or may not know this), I'll learn a lot from it, but this time it might not come off. If my aim is to maximise new learning, I should do Y, but if my aim is produce the highest quality work, I should do X. Now if I'm the teacher assigning and marking this work [and by the way, I have often been in just this situation], I'm in a real bind - I want my students to learn, so I should be encouraging them to do Y, but in fairness I have to award higher marks to better work; and as noted, in a large class I won't know to what extent each student is taking each strategy, because I won't have perfect knowledge of what the students know or can do, so even if I wanted to reward students who choose to go for Y, I can't reliably do it. (One student's X work will be another's Y work!) In the end I'll do some fudge (and different teachers will do different fudges). That the grades coming out of that fudge actually matter to university admissions means that it'll be very hard for me to tell my students that they should go for Y because they'll learn more and do better work in the long run: any student who sees their GPA as at risk of not being good enough now is obviously going to switch to strategy X. Risk taking and learning are reduced.
Here's another thing I don't think I'm making up. How many times have you read about someone postponing, or considering postponing, the point at which their child enters high school or takes high school classes for credit, because "the grades count". Wouldn't it be better if those decisions could be taken on the basis of what's best for the child's learning?
Of course assessing just on the basis of exams is problematic; I'm not claiming I know a perfect system. In the UK many qualifications have included elements like coursework (where a given exercise is marked by the student's own teacher against a given markscheme, with a sample being externally moderated) or variants like work that's done under controlled conditions (e.g. away from parents and the internet!) but without time limit. Those all have their own problems, and are relatively out of favour at present.
I had to google Dux Litterarum - apparently it exists, but that's how prominent a concept it is here. In contrast, I've more than once read "is it fair to deprive him/her of the chance to be valedictorian?" as a thing to take into consideration when contemplating a skip.
To try to drag this back into relevance to this forum, and in recognition that however we feel about the system we aren't generally in a position to change it, here's what I think the implications are for us as parents of gifted children. By and large our children are the ones who are going to do well anyway. Our job is to try to make sure they see the hoop-jumping GPA-game-playing for what it is: a silly game which has precious little to do with learning. It's fine if they need to follow strategy X sometimes in order to obtain their goals, but let's help them know what they're doing and be doing it by deliberate choice, not just because they can't imagine any other way. Let's tell on them if they're doing X and the teacher thinks they're doing Y! Let's encourage them to take risks - even, sometimes, risks with the GPA. If that's too hard, at least ask them, "What would be the most interesting thing to do here, if you didn't need to care what the teacher would think of the end result?"
