Newsweek 2006 Best high schools

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Uncertain predictor of success </p>

<p>In terms of admissions, research on whether AP involvement can predict a student’s success in college appear inconclusive at best. State-based studies by the National Center for Educational Accountability in Texas and the University of California-Berkeley, to name two, show that students who pass AP exams are more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than those who don’t pass. </p>

<p>Even so, the California study also found that taking AP (and honors) courses bore “little or no relationship to students’ later performance in college” and suggested that institutions reconsider the use of AP as an admissions criterion. </p>

<p>Meanwhile, in a just-released update of a 1999 Education Department study showing that the “academic intensity of the curriculum” is a predictor of bachelor’s degree completion, researcher Clifford Adelman found that, by itself, AP coursework did not “reach the threshold of significance.” </p>

<p>And in a not-yet-published study of 465 college students nationwide who had taken both an AP science exam and the corresponding introductory science course, researchers at Harvard and the University of Virginia found that even an AP exam score of 5, the highest possible, was no guarantee of a college grade of A in the same course.

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<p><a href=“http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-03-20-ap-main_x.htm[/url]”>http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-03-20-ap-main_x.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;