Frequently Asked Questions

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 website, 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 five 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 website list in 2006 get larger after the magazine came out?

At the top of the website list we invite all qualifying schools we may have missed to email 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.

AP and IB are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations. Studies by U.S. Department of Education senior researcher Clifford Adelman in 1999 and 2005 showed that the best predictors of college graduation were not good high school grades or test scores, but whether or not a student had an intense academic experience in high school. Such experiences were produced by taking higher-level math and English courses and struggling with the demands of college-level courses like AP or IB. Two recent studies looked at more than 150,000 students in California and Texas and found if they had passing scores on AP exams they were more likely to do well academically in college.

To send a student off to college without having had an AP or IB course and test is like insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels. It is dumb, and in my view a form of educational malpractice. But most American high schools still do it, and I don't think such schools should be rewarded because they have artificially high AP or IB passing rates achieved by making certain just their best students take the tests.

Newsweek and the Washington Post, however, have added a new statistic developed by the College Board that indicates how well students are doing on the exams at each school while still recognizing the importance of increasing student participation. It is the equity and excellence rate, the percentage of ALL graduating seniors, including those who never got near an AP course, who had at least one score of 3 or above on at least one AP test sometime in high school. The average equity and excellence rate in 2006 for all schools, including those that lacked AP programs, was 14.8 percent. In the 2007 Newsweek list, we give the equity and excellence percentage for those schools that have the necessary data. We ask IB schools to calculate their IB, or combined AP-IB, equity and excellence rate, using a 4 on the 7-point IB test as the equivalent of a 3 on the AP.

4. Why do you divide by the number of graduating seniors, and does that mean you only count tests taken by seniors? Don't you know that juniors, and sometimes even sophomores and freshman take AP tests?