Grades vs Class Difficulty

Obviously grades are a huge part of the school experience, and they basically have a strangle hold on most students lives and future college choice. This on its own is already a problem with the school system but I am going to focus on the point of difficulty of students classes and their grades to create a bases for their class rank and other merit based achievements. If you look at the NCAA Basketball Tournament Bracket teams are placed by not just their wins but by their "strength of schedule" which means that teams cannot just rig their schedule to be easy so that they don't lose a game. This should be incorporated into the school system because currently many students can achieve a 4.0 by taking all general classes, or if they took easy advanced classes could even achieve a 5.0 weighted GPA, all without taking a single AP class. This is not fair for the students who strive to take difficult classes and learn more in school, who also risk obtaining worse grades due to the increased difficulty of the class. Some colleges will look at the students schedule when they look at their GPA, but most of the time if a students class rank and GPA are not where the college would like them to be at then the student would not even get a chance, when a student taking easier classes would at least get a look at the college. Overall, schools should alter the way that students are ranked and gain merit based achievements to be based more on difficulty of their classes than purely on the grades that the students obtains.