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Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors. All of the schools on the list have an index of at least 1.000; they are in the top 6 percent of public schools measured this way.
From the look of that rating system..that seems to be an incredibly poor way to rank a school.
For instance, look at number 1 & 2 on the list. Number one has a higher index so that means a larger proportion of the students took one of the tests...but number 2 has a higher E&E score (percentage of test-takers who passed at least one of those tests)...to me, the percentage of students who passed should be more important than the percentage who participated...
Numbers 8 and 14 had 32% and 33% (respectively) of students pass at least one of the AP or IB tests...those are incredibly low percentages...
I really hope I'm misinterpreting the methodology and/or results; I hope these results aren't as crap as they look....
Of the 30 schools in Colorado on this list, the % passing at least one test varies from 4.4% to 69%. I don't get it. If you have a lot of students taking these tests, and only 4.4% pass at least one, is this a great school?
This ranking shows up here every year and it is the same thing over and over, it is simply a ranking on the number of kids that TAKE an AP test, they don't even have to PASS the tests, only take them. The top ranked schools on this list REQUIRE all the student to take the AP tests. For the schools that are ranked on the number of kids in their IB program that take the IB test. Minneapolis has a school or two on the list usually, ranked solely on the kids from the IB program, all 45 of them district-wide so they are raking a school of about 2000 kids based on the performance of a handful of kids, nevermind that the actual graduation rate in that school is about 40% . This survey means nothing.
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. This survey means nothing.
