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I graduated from HS 15 years ago.
Our GPA was calculated according to letter grades (A= 4.0; A- = 3.7, etc.), however, we could get a GPA boost for Honors (A= 4.5; A- = 4.2, etc.) or AP (A= 5.0; A- = 4.7, etc.) courses. So yes, the harder your classes were, the more weight it counted for in your GPA. That was done to reward people for taking harder courses and not have a valedictorian who had the highest GPA but not have the academic rigor of a student who may have taken all AP classes senior year.
But in terms of class rank, you could only have 1 student in each slot. Although my class was large (686 students) it was highly competitive. In order to achieve the 'one kid in a slot' rank, our GPAs were calculated to the 1000th point. (For frame of reference, I graduated with a 4.184). If there were any 'ties' the tie-breaker was done based on the # of harder courses you took. In general, there were no ties, at least towards the top of the class. I did get annoyed that the girl just above me in the class beat me out by .001 of a point, but I took more honors and AP classes than she did (she just got As where I may have gotten an A- or B+ that pulled me down a little).
Apparently, one year, valedictorian came down to the fact that one kid had taken Honors Gym (yes, we had Honors gym--harder courses e.g. dance or being a PE ass't for freshman/sophomore gym. Honors gym was only available to juniors and seniors) and the salutatorian had not. As someone who took Honors dance for gym--it wasn't easy--I can see where the salutatorian would've been pissed that year but the other person had to have worked hard to get an A.
It is my understanding that my HS still does things this way, but they are looking into changing it as we seem to be an island amongst our HS neighbors; most of whom no longer report rank. This was taken from a forum about that issue:
"In the Class of 2012, there was a .096 difference in grade point average between students ranked 5 and 25. There was a 0.689 difference in grade point average between students ranked 50-100."
And as a side note--I was particularly proud of the women in my HS class. One one member of the top 10 in my class was male (and he was #10).
I have a friend who went to another HS in my state and he was 1 of 5 valedictorians. He was miffed that he took a harder course load than any of the others but they were rewarded the same way.
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