Our school offers separate honors classes in most content area classes and in a few electives and specialty classes (art, music, business). There are a handful of electives that offer embedded honors. The honors student often has more reading and writing and their work is scored on a different rubric than the college prep students in the class.
As far as grades - they need to have an A or higher in the previous content area course to be edible for honors. I don't know about maintaining a certain grade to get an honors designation. I'd assume if they did the work, their grade would reflect their achievement in the honors track.
In our school honors courses are worth more to the GPA. For instance an A in honors is worth 5.3 points and an A in CP gets 4.8 points. I would imagine this weighting would apply.
