First, sincere congrats to your son. That's really awesome. I don't know how your school calculates the GPAs, but I'm guessing an A in a regular class is 4 points and then maybe an A in an AP or DE class is a 5 (or do they do A+ or something?). At many High Schools (including Blacksburg back in the day), an A in an AP or DE is a 5. In any decent sized school there are a bunch of students that will get straight A's. Therefore, any "regular" (non DE or AP) class you take and get an A in, actually brings your grade down. So in order to be valedictorian at those schools, you need to minimize regular classes. So those schools have kids that will take HS classes at local community colleges so they get the credits, but don't get a "bad" grade of a 4 to pull their grades down. Then you take as many study halls as possible and don't take "regular" classes like Latin or Chinese or Computer Science, or History, etc. that might actually broaden your horizons, etc. So in many schools it's impossible to be valedictorian unless you play those games of taking as few classes as possible (and, of course, taking as many AP and DE classes as possible). It's a bad incentive for students. Blacksburg made some changes to how they calculate GPAs recently (I think they add something like 0.034 to your GPA for every AP or DE class you take).