Most Challenging High Schools - Southwest Number 8 in Minnesota

State of Minnesota

RANK	SCHOOL	CITY	STATE	E&E%	SUBS. LUNCH	INDEX
1	St. Croix Prep	Stillwater	MN	64.00	6.00	6.338
2	International School of Minnesota (P)	Eden Prairie	MN	100.00		5.310
3	Minnetonka	Minnetonka	MN	90.00	7.00	4.769
4	St. Louis Park	St. Louis Park	MN	50.00	36.00	4.106
5	Edina	Edina	MN	70.00		3.709
6	Mounds View	Arden Hills	MN	54.10	12.20	3.666
7	Orono	Orono	MN	67.00	8.00	3.419
8	Southwest	Minneapolis	MN	60.00		3.353
9	Irondale	New Brighton	MN	51.00	41.20	3.271
10	Eastview	Apple Valley	MN	56.00	18.00	3.036
11	Robbinsdale Armstrong	Plymouth	MN	30.00	35.00	2.996
12	Central	St. Paul	MN		58.00	2.978
13	Simley	Inver Grove Heights	MN	38.80	39.00	2.904
14	Chanhassen	Chanhassen	MN	49.00	8.00	2.875
15	Chaska	Chaska	MN	41.00	27.00	2.813
16	St. Anthony Village	St. Anthony	MN			2.380
17	Mahtomedi	Mahtomedi	MN	61.90	3.00	2.259
18	Century	Rochester	MN	33.70	24.00	2.101
19	Brainerd	Brainerd	MN	24.80	33.00	1.938
20	Eagan	Eagan	MN	52.10	13.00	1.908

How the America’s Most Challenging High Schools list works

Jay Mathews is an education columnist and blogger for the Washington Post, his employer for 40 years.

1. How does the America’s Most Challenging High Schools list work?

We take the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests given at a school each year and divide by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. I call this formula the Challenge Index. With a few exceptions, public schools that achieved a ratio of at least 1.00, meaning they had as many tests in 2015 as they had graduates, were put on the national list. We rank the schools in order of that ratio, with the highest (27.32) this year achieved by BASIS Oro Valley, in Oro Valley, Ariz., which takes the top spot for the second straight year.

[See the national America’s Most Challenging High Schools list]

I think 1.00 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, just more than 10 percent of the approximately 22,000 U.S. public high schools managed to reach that standard and earn placement on our list. On our list, the top 220 schools are in the top 1 percent nationally, the top 440 in the top 2 percent, and so on.

[See the Washington area America’s Most Challenging High Schools list]

2. Why do you count only the number of tests given, and not how well the students do on the tests?
Some schools brag about their high passing rates on AP or IB, meaning the percentage of test-takers who scored 3, 4 or 5 on the 5-point AP exam or 4, 5, 6 or 7 on the 7-point IB exam. Passing scores make students eligible for credit at many colleges and universities.

I decided not to count passing rates in this way because I found that many high schools kept those rates artificially high by allowing only top students to take the courses. AP, IB and Cambridge are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations. Research has found that even low-performing students who got a 2 on an AP test did significantly better in college than similar students who did not take AP.

[Read this year’s column about the 2016 list]

On the list, we also give readers a sense of how well each school’s students are doing on the tests by posting the Equity and Excellence rate, which is the percentage of all graduating seniors, including those who never took an AP course, who had at least one score of 3 or above on at least one AP test sometime in high school. The nonprofit College Board, which oversees the AP program, invented this metric. It found that the average Equity and Excellence rate in 2015 was 22.4 percent.

http://apps.washingtonpost.com/local/highschoolchallenge/.