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Originally Posted by AnesthesiaMD
I will not answer for the poster to whom you are asking, but for me, it cuts away all of the BS in the rankings. I dont really care about the number of kids that get free school lunch, or diversity, or many of the other criteria that many of the school rankings use, which I consider to be extraneous. I am results-oriented. The SAT scores give me the most objective measurement of a school that I know of. It is not the only thing I look at, but the other things I do look at are purely academic, like AP courses and college completion rates.
When I look back at my own life, I see a series of tests on which I had to do well to get to where I am today, and the SAT was the first major exam in the series of exams that led up to where I am today. And dont get me wrong, I know that there are many life pathways that do not require rigorous academic testing. And if one of my children decides that he or she would be happiest as an artist or other career in one of these alternative pathways, they have my support 100%. But no harm will come to them attending one of these schools, but at least they will have options open to them.
And I dont know that I would classify #20 as being much better than #40, if at all. But I would certainly prefer my children go to schools closer to the top of the list than the bottom.
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Agree, though the one area where I do care about things that aren't results-oriented are in the course offerings of the school. My daughter (the only one high-school aged of my kids) is taking TV production as an elective and learning to play the bagpipes. When she's ready for AP classes, her high school will offer 26 of them to choose from. They're hosting an ACT/SAT hybrid practice test in a couple weeks for $15. Of course that kind of thing is hard to use in rankings, so better to just leave out anything other than scores, attendance, graduation rate, etc.
It doesn't exactly bother me that we're #92 on the list of NJ schools, but I laughed when I saw that we're ranked below some other schools (which I won't point out by name, but I know aren't as good on an academic level). We'd still choose this town even if US News ranked us dead last, as long as the school stayed the same.
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