The issue really is that these kids shouldn't be wasting their time with AP and honors classes that just function as GPA boosters; they should be taking dual enrollment classes with their community college to knock off whatever classes they can before actually going to college (typically their English and Math credits). These poor kids work their asses off in AP classes and have to take bullshit exams just for most of them to not get any college credits unless they took like one of the 3 classes that actually do which are unnecessarily difficult.
There's all kinds of shit like this that when you're young, they make you think it's worth something and then when you get out in the real world you find out the effort is worth shit.
I went to a super hard and kind of prestegious high school. They really pushed the whole Regents thing. The school was a Regents school. You had to pass the Regents at the end of the year, which is a harder version of what normal schools would call finals. With crazier repercussions - if you failed a Regents test, you fail your entire class for the year so if you were maintaining a 95 in class all year and crash and burn on the Regents test at the end of the year, well, fuck you, you fail.
And my school was so strict that two CUMULATIVE failures over the whole 4 years meant you got tossed out of the school so you really didn't want to fail a class because you only get one more chance over the next few years to not get tossed out. And trust me, throw out they did. My last name is near the middle of the alphabet, by the time I graduated, almost 80 kids had been tossed out over 4 years, and that's just between A and the middle of the alphabet. I have no idea how many were tossed out from me to the end of the alphabet. I just know that between starting at high school and graduating, I got moved back three homerooms.
So there's teenage me, stressed, suffering, studying, panicking, etc. I pass all the regents over all 4 years. I graduated and I got my coveted "Regents Diploma" which has a nice, shiny gold shield on it to let everyone know my diploma is worth more because it's a Regents diploma and I passed all my Regents tests versus peons who just went to normal high schools and passed normal finals.
And it's meant jack shit.
I have no idea what the whole point of it was. No one has ever asked to ever look at my high school diploma, much less offered me a job or congratulated me for having the shiny gold shield on it.
Fucking bullshit, all of it.