There isn't. People figure out how to "game" them all, making the attempt rather pointless within a very short time.
Some of DD's top-10 "competitors" in school used a lot of trickery to goose their GPA's; avoiding classes which were unweighted by taking them over the summer at other institutions, so that they wouldn't be part of the calculated GPA, figuring out ways to have ONLY their AP/Honors weighted courses included in their GPA, etc. Some of those tactics were pretty extreme.
I was pretty happy to see that the kid when went au naturale there was the one who wound up number 1 in the end. I think that in her case (and I'd feel this way if she'd wound up number 2 or even 3) the weighting system really worked, because her transcripts are not pristine-- she has grades other than A+ on them. She was able to take risks and learn from mistakes.
I also kind of had to laugh, because for all of that jockeying around, the two radically accelerated PG kiddos were the ones who wound up 1,2-- and WAY out in front of the rest of the class. The reason was that they were the two who were able to truly ace the AP coursework and take on a wider variety of it-- not just mathy or lit-based stuff, but pretty much every offering.
Yes, my DD did do some playing of the game (she added AP USH late when she realized that her gpa was dropping because of an unweighted advanced math course that she was getting straight A's in)-- but only when it served her interests as a whole as well as her desire to be number 1.
For a perfectionist PG kid in a system that was insufficiently challenging, that top spot wasn't that unreasonable a goal, so we didn't feel that we could really say much about it when she decided she wanted it. It wasn't unhealthy in any way, that competition. DD knew everyone in the top 5, and was good friends with 3 of those people, and cordial with the other one.
I guess I look at this sort of thing this way-- secondary ed isn't really much more than a game at this point in many schools. DD was marking time until she had that bit of paper and could move along to the next stage in her life. She needed certain soft skills and better executive function for that next stage, so that is what her high school career was mostly about. It wasn't for learning the curriculum, which she mostly found trivially easy. Learning to play the game and play well-- I rationalize that this, too, has a place in the world. I further posit that kids at high LOG and who have strong justice orientations may need, more than others, to learn those things, because a lot of it is about how unethical a contestant is willing to be in order to "win" at any point in time. My DD had to decide on an existential level whether she was willing to play-- and to what degree. What did her own ethics dictate about what constituted reasonable personal conduct there?
SHE decided, for example, that she refused to superscore on standardized exams. She finds the practice abhorrent and dishonest, and couldn't do it in spite of the fact that she KNOWS that she is in a very small minority among high-achieving peers. She can't do anything about them-- only herself. So she lived with a disappointing set of SAT scores, and vowed to do better with the ACT (which she did).
That kind of decision-making and growth was a really important step prior to college, which asks kids to live in an ambiguous environment where THEY must adapt to the system as it is. That's a really tough thing for young matriculants, in my experience. The rules in the game of life aren't really the same for everyone. That's just the way it is.
