Corbett's Advanced Placement Passing Rates

Corbett High School was ranked 8th in the nation by Newsweek Magazine in 2009 based on its rate of participation in the Advanced Placement program. This is a remarkable achievement, but with a caveat: what about the PASSING rates? It's the second question that comes up at every conference and presentation that we do.

So what about Corbett's passing rates? There are a number of ways to look at this question, but let's get away from the sweeping statements and look at specifics.

Last year Corbett had .12% of all of the students in the State of Oregon. So what would be a reasonable passing rate? It seems to me that we ought to have .12% of the passing scores in each subject in order to have 'our share'. So how did we show up, subject by subject? I'm going to create an index where if got .12% of Oregon's total passes in a subject, we call that a "1". "1" means we got our share. If we got .24% of all of the passing scores in the state, we get a "2". With me? (The reason for presenting this way is simple...it eliminates the need for everyone to pull out a calculator to deal with decimals and percent signs.

Let's start with an easy one. In Biology, Corbett students posted .6% of all of Oregon's passing scores. Divide that by Corbett's .12% of Oregon's student population, and you get an index score of "5". So Corbett passed 5 times its share of AP Biology Exams last year.

Here are some other indexed results:

Subject Index
Biology 5
Calculus (ab) 6.5
Calculus (bc) 22 (yes, really)
Statistics 27
Micro Economics 8
World History 48 (not a typo)
Chemistry 13
Physics 18
Psychology 16
English 19
Spanish 7
Studio Art 29

What's Corbett 'fair share' in each case? A score of 1. Did we really have 48 times our 'share' pass World History last year? Indeed we did.

Corbett's passing rates are not remarkable if one divides the number of exams passed by the number attempted. And while we have kids earning college credit, class by class, exam by exam, at anywhere from 5 to 50 times the rate of their peers around the state, I can't bring myself to care. We are in the business of learning what we can and creating exceptional opportunities for kids. Business is good.