I feel your pain.
Luckily, our school did away with class rank, but they still confer Latin honors, and it's difficult to get highest honors if a student takes too many unweighted courses. My son knows that taking orchestra all four years will lower his GPA, which does annoy me, given that it's a very rigorous music curriculum. I have no idea how this could be fixed - even if one limits the number of weighted grades a student could receive in a given year, there are other ways to "game" the system (students figuring out which no-cut varsity sport they can join to try and get an exemption from the required, but non-weighted PE... or back when it was offered, student would take the Consumer Education proficiency test to get out of taking the non-weighted, but required in our state, course). I want my kids to be well rounded and be able to take art or music or business classes, all of which are unweighted. I tell my son that all of the kids who are at the top, trying to inch their GPA a little higher, will likely be accepted to many colleges based on GPA and ACT/SAT scores. The real fight will be for scholarships or elite acceptances, and for those, it will be much more beneficial to look well-rounded than to have a tenth of a point higher GPA. At least I hope that is true!
