Trying to figure out how to word this without sounding obnoxious. I apologize in advance if I fail.
@SoozieVT in post 7 above pretty much nailed the key info you need but there is another wrinkle and I don’t know if this applies to you @theatrework or not but it did apply to our situation.
Some of the most academically rigorous schools in the country do not weight grades. Do not offer AP classes and may or may not even offer honors classes. But they screen heavily who they admit including some sort of a testing threshold. It’s basically hard core academic admissions 4 years before college even starts. Then they merrily roll along with all classes being of exceptional rigor and eventually spit out a graduating class where 60% of the students are national merit finalists or something like that which pretty much validates the concept academically anyway. If you are drawn to that sort of thing, chances are your kid will end up with a fantastic education before ever setting foot on a college campus. So far, so good.
Now the HS college counselors of those kinds of schools will regularly field frantic questions from concerned parents and students with respect to how do colleges know that from this school, it is so hard to earn an “A” or have a GPA that is anywhere near a 4.0. And the wise and knowing counselors will say, “don’t worry, the schools know our school and how we work.” Yes, that’s likely true if you are talking about any of the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, Claremonts, Johns Hopkins, Tufts and many other schools like that. But what if the school you really mean is a lesser academic school that houses the killer MT program? Guess what… the colleges DON’T know your high school because they don’t normally see any applicants from it and that 3.5, 3.6, maybe 3.7 GPA from a killer academic school will carry a lot less weight in terms of admissions and scholarships than the 3.8, 3.9, 4.0 from a school where maybe there was far less rigor and on average a far less academically invested student body.
Every school has their academic stars who would do well anywhere so please get my point. Some schools just have more of them (because they screen for it) and set the rigor of their curriculum accordingly. So you sit in classes with more academic stars and when it comes time for things like providing data like class rank, students are ranked against more of these academic stars. Or in many cases the schools refuse to rank just as they do not weight grades.
Here is the rub. Colleges indeed look at school profiles to assess what you did as a student in your HS vs. what everyone else did. It’s a good way to get a general read of what kind of student you were within the environment of the school you were at. But if you go to school with a bunch of geniuses, that’s an interesting comparison. From my experience, colleges will (understandably) spend a heck of a lot less time really getting underneath the rigor of one school vs. the other when it comes to a high school they don’t have much experience with. They will rely on things like unweighted GPA, number of APs and things like that and judge from there. I’m speaking in general terms but from my experience, that’s pretty much what happens.
So in conclusion, my feeling is that if you want to be handed diamonds and pearls from lesser academic colleges with the killer MT program, you are more likely to unearth those treasures by making choices that help secure better grades from whatever level of rigor than you are going balls to the wall on academics. Personally, I’d never play that game for the sake of gaming the system and didn’t. I’d rather seek out the appropriate education for the student at hand whatever that means and not spend high school trying to game college. Spend high school grabbing the appropriate educational experiences instead of thinking about how it provides a path to college.