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Well in my area there is a pretty heavy split in race. Our high school was (believe it or not) 50% asian, 35% hispanic, and then there was the rest (white, black, etc.).
This might sound stereotyping to people but this was the truth (from transcripts and records) - the Asians tended to have higher average GPAs. The valedectorian/salutatorians were almost always Asian (in the last 10 years at least). This tended to place more Asians in the top 10 so last names obviously were slanted towards the more common ones (namely C, L, W).
Of course that is nothing conclusive at all and is a really small sample size, but that is the *racial* factor one might put into play. If a race in an area generally performs higher on average, that might place more in certain last names.
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