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Valedictorian has been a meaningless accolade for a long time anyway.
For one thing, they grade AP courses on a 5-point scale, and my stepdaughter's high school even has a level above that, "dual credit" which is somehow better than AP and for which an A gets you a 6.0. When I was in high school, they started finding ways for kids to earn "honors" credit in orchestra, shop, tennis, etc., because otherwise all the top kids were quitting those in favor of classes that would inch their GPA higher. In the year above me, a kid transferred to a ghetto ass high school on the other side of town for his senior year, because he was a shoo-in for valedictorian there, while in our school he would have been ranked 10th-ish. College admissions staff have known for a long time that the top 50 kids in a competitive, wealthy district were all going to be better educated and more skilled than the valedictorian at every podunk backwoods Appalachian high school.
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