The class rank piece was very really at my daughter’s HS. Since AP and honors were weighted, trying to stay in the top 10% without them was nearly impossible. When my daughter took her engineering sequence, it wasn’t considered an honors class even though there were honors math and science pre-reqs. She got 100 every semester but it actually brought her GPA down because it wasn’t weighted. The school has since remedied that but I know the kids who were in the running for valedictorian didn’t take that sequence even though they wanted to do engineering and were interested.