Frequently Asked Questions About NEWSWEEK’s Best American High Schools

May 28, 2007 issue - 1.  How does the Challenge Index work?

We take the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests given at a school in May, and divide by the number of seniors graduating in May or June. All public schools that NEWSWEEK researchers Dan Brillman, Halley Bondy and Becca Kaufman found that achieved a ratio of at least 1.000, meaning they had as many tests in 2006 as they had graduates, are put on the list on the NEWSWEEK Web site, and the 100 schools with the highest ratios are named in the magazine.

NEWSWEEK published national lists based on the same formula in 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005 and 2006. In the Washington Post, I have reported the Challenge Index ratings for every public school in the Washington area every year since 1998. I think 1.000 is a modest standard. A school can reach that level if only half of its students take one AP, IB or Cambridge test in their junior year and one in their senior year. But this year only about 5 percent of all U.S. public high schools managed to reach that standard and be placed on the NEWSWEEK list.

2. Why did the number of schools on the NEWSWEEK Web site list in 2006 get larger after the magazine came out?

At the top of the Web site list we invite all qualifying schools we may have missed to e-mail us their data so that we can put them on the list. There is no national database that has the number of AP, IB and Cambridge tests and number of June graduates for each public high school, so we have had to build our own. We are happy to capture the few schools we missed by using the publicity generated by publication of a new list.

3. Why do you count only the number of tests given, and not how well the students do on the tests?

In the past, schools have usually reported their passing rates on AP or IB as a sign of how well their programs were doing. When I say passing rate, I mean the percentage of students who scored 3, 4 or 5 on the 5-point AP test or 4, 5, 6 or 7 on the 7-point IB test. (The Cambridge tests, although similar to AP and IB, are used in very few schools, and rarely appear in school assessments.) Passing AP or IB scores are the rough equivalent of a C or C-plus in a college course and make the student eligible for credit at most colleges.

I decided not to count passing rates in the way schools had done in the past because I found that most American high schools kept those rates artificially high by allowing only top students to take the courses. In some other instances, they opened the courses to all but encouraged only the best students to take the tests.

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