I think it is rediculous that Honor students in TEXAS get an extra 10 points for honors classes and always make the straight A honor roll where my kiddo gets all A's but one 88 and she is on the A/B honor roll. In other words some kid who goofs off and gets an 80 in Honors gets a 90. Not a fair way to assess achievment IMHO.
Nobody told me that there was any special benefit for getting into honors courses at all. I just thought it was just a recognition that you're able to do more advanced work and that it would look good on your transcript when you applied to college. That's the way it was when I was a kid.
Consequently, we didn't push very hard to get him into honors courses. It wasn't until his junior year that I discovered that other parents had been lobbying teachers to get their kids into every possible honors course. I just assumed that his GPA of 3.8 or whatever it was obviously going to get him into one of the flagship universities. Well, hell, it was barely top quartile. Even with all the honors courses he started taking at that point, he never had a chance to get into the top 10% by the time he had to apply.
Fortunately, he aced the SAT and had outstanding extracirricular credentials to list on his application. He got into A&M, but it was by the skin of his teeth. At the end of his freshman year, he has straight A's in all his classes. Yet he was almost denied admission because of all these stupid rules. Grrrrrr.