By Jose Escarce Santa Monica
Regarding “Samohi still among cream of crop” (SMDP, May 3, page 1). In my opinion, Samohi’s drop from 199 in 2005 to 256 in 2006 on the Newsweek ranking of American high schools is meaningless. First, this is a change within the top 1 percent of high schools in the nation. Minor fluctuations are expected in the ranking based on minor differences across years in the characteristics of junior and senior students. Second, as the article notes, more schools are added to the Newsweek list every year. Third, the Newsweek ranking is based on the “Challenge Index,” which is calculated by dividing the total number of Advanced Placement (AP) exams taken at a school by the number of graduating seniors. As AP has soared in popularity, many high schools have entered a phase of rapid growth in their Challenge Index. Samohi was ahead of the curve on AP and had its phase of rapid growth in the Challenge Index a few years ago.
Despite the popular appeal of the Challenge Index, it is a limited measure of an AP program because it only captures the extent of AP course and exam taking; the index contains no information about performance on the exams. Of course, a comprehensive assessment of an AP program requires tracking performance as well.
Samohi offers 16 AP courses. The most common performance measure is the “passing” rate for AP exams, which by convention is the percentage of exams with a score of three or higher. According to data reported by the California Department of Education, in the last three academic years Samohi’s passing rates were 73 percent, 73 percent, and 72 percent. These compare very favorably with a national passing rate of 59 percent for the 16 exams offered at Samohi. A more useful, though stricter, standard is the percentage of exams with a score of four or higher, because very few (if any) colleges any longer award credit or placement for scores of three. Again, Samohi fares extremely well, with rates of 45 percent, 46 percent, and 45 percent in the last three years. The corresponding national rate is 34 percent.
Finally, recently the College Board has been promoting a new measure that it argues captures both access to and performance on AP: the percentage of all graduating seniors who had at least one score of 3 or higher on an AP exam at some point during their school career. We have not calculated this measure ourselves, but Newsweek reports Samohi’s value as 45.7 percent (the E and E percent). Assuming this value is correct (this is a much harder figure to calculate than the Index), Samohi again does exceptionally well. The corresponding values are 19.7 percent for California and 14.1 percent for the nation.
By any measure, Samohi has an excellent Advanced Placement program.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 5, 2006. Read the original PDF.