However, without considering the context of the school, this will be still unfair for some. Consider the school where no honor courses are offered. Also consider 2 candidates from the same school, one with 20 courses with 8 honors and another with 40 courses with 16 honors. They are not the same. And we are not talking about any hardship for a candidate.
To be frank, I don’t know what can be the magic formula. I am pretty sure that UC does not compute the rigor from school context by hand and they have some formulas somewhere in the application system. How fair is that? I also don’t know.
Even auto-admit schools’ auto-admit criteria may be seen as unfair by some applicants (e.g. UT Austin rank-based auto-admit by applicants in high schools where the student cohort is very strong and competitive).
Basically, any non-open-admission college’s admission criteria, whether formulaic like CSUs or holistic like UCs, will have complaints of unfairness from applicants whose profiles are mismatched to or not optimized for the admission criteria.