This is interesting, and actually similar to a policy that a lot of elite high schools in the US follow: not ranking their students. If you have good unis accepting 50% of your class, ranking your students unnecessarily makes your 50th percentile weaker candidates than the 95th percentile at schools that rank (often even if those schools only have 2-3% getting into top-flight unis).
However, the downside of not ranking is that your top 1-5% of students are not clear to the extreme elite (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) schools, meaning there is no one who is "guaranteed" those positions, as even your top 5% has to compete with students in the top 20 or 30% for admittance. For high schools that couldn't hope to admit more than 5% of their class in top tier unis, it makes sense to rank (as then you get to showcase your top students as being exceptional). If you expect 20% or more to be competitive candidates though, it's usually better to stay quiet on relative success.
Yeah, it's funny. A friend of mine got one B in high school and ended up outside the top 5% of his class (which matters for some scholarships) because there were twelve kids with straight A's. If he had been a year younger he would have been second in his class.
Yeah, my high school stopped publishing class ranks in transcripts as of my graduating class because something like you got down to 50 or 60 out of a class of nearly 300 before you got below a 4.0 GPA and it was hurting kids on college admissions.
Liberal arts magnet school that only took the top students in a metro area of 250k people. You had to test in to be admitted and failing any one class meant you went back to one of the area's non-magnet high schools.
So not inflation, just that the student body was limited to kids that were going to make high grades anyway with very heavy AP course loads (which push GPAs over 4.0 since they're weighted).
It usually comes across pretty clearly in the recommendation letters, which admissions teams value over GPA, test scores, etc, since everyone's numbers are high.
However, the downside of not ranking is that your top 1-5% of students are not clear to the extreme elite (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) schools, meaning there is no one who is "guaranteed" those positions, as even your top 5% has to compete with students in the top 20 or 30% for admittance. For high schools that couldn't hope to admit more than 5% of their class in top tier unis, it makes sense to rank (as then you get to showcase your top students as being exceptional). If you expect 20% or more to be competitive candidates though, it's usually better to stay quiet on relative success.