We're Number One

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We're Number One!!

 

                Apparently, according to the U.S. News and World Report, Kennedy is ranked the number one high school in Iowa for the first time ever.  And, Washington, who has historically been ranked number one for as long as I remember, isn’t even in the top ten.  Something about this seems either rigged, biased, or just a strange way of evaluating the quality of schools.  One of the major ways this report ranks schools is by their participation percentages in AP exams for seniors.  Since I learned this, it makes much more sense to me why Kennedy’s administration pushes the AP classes so hard.  They want their school to look superior to all the rest.

 

                Also factored into the score is percentage of students who take AP exams that pass (get a score of 3 or higher).  From my personal experience, this is a miserable score, and should under no circumstances earn any college credit at any school.  Even a 4 isn’t too hot, and in my opinion, students shouldn’t even have a chance to receive college credit from AP exams unless they score a 5 on the exam.  On most exams, a score of a 3 correlates to about a 40% on the exam.  Many people could walk in, never being trained in the area the exam is testing, and get that score just from using some common sense mixed with intelligent guessing.  In one of my AP courses during my sophomore, I had a pretty sub-par teacher, and wasn’t yet mature enough to learn all of the material on my own.  As a result, I was embarrassingly unprepared for the exam, but I was surprised to see that I scored a 3.  It’s just not that difficult.

                In conclusion, although I am very happy for my school to be ranked number one in the state, I don’t think the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings are totally justified.  In my opinion, Washington is a very slightly better school than Kennedy, and not even including them in the top ten really makes me question this report.  However, if you asked my opinion on a better way to rank schools, I wouldn’t really be able to tell you one.  It’s just a hard thing to measure, and there are so many different factors that should be taken into consideration.  In addition, how to properly weight these different factors makes the whole thing even more complicated.  Ranking schools just isn’t an exact science, and isn’t really as important as it is made out to be in the first place.