I will admit that no student taking ‘cake courses’ ended up in the top 20. They DID, at one point, rank the top students in order of their GPAs, starting at 4 and going up. There were about 20 in that level. I don’t remember how many kids were in his class.
When I was in high school (class of 1973), the valedictorian was the girl who took the cake courses and aced them. Of course she went on to a liberal arts college, and had a skull full of mush. The “heavy head trip” in schools was just starting. This was IMHO the precursor to political correctness.