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" http://t.co/YBHoykFy Shakespeare w/ an iPad. Focus on integration, not tech focused. Tech is a tool to enhance learning. Comments welcome. " — wanderacademic
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Awesome table! Will be cool when data from more schools are added.
Interesting to see that there is NO correlation between a school’s average SAT composite score and their average IB diploma score. (To see this, just sort the table based on the SAT composite.)
Pretty slick…
Actually, IB diploma scores and SAT scores do show a (weak) positive correlation. Using these numbers, for every 1-point increase in avg IB diploma outcomes, SAT composite scores increase by about 21 points. Standard error (~15) is relatively high, but there is an 81% chance the positive relationship is not zero.
I see. I shouldn’t have said, “There no correlation.” I should have said, “There’s a weak, statistically insignificant correlation.” Good catch! (‘Just messing with you…)
What I’d really like to see are fields like average high school teacher salary, proportion of the high school faculty with teaching certificates and/or graduate degrees, average years of experience, and whether the school offers free housing or not… and about 200 more observations. This could help answer the question of whether teacher pay determines IB or SAT results.
I’ll work on it…
More reasonably it would determine that schools that pay well statistically also draw higher performing students. I really doubt the correlation would best be explained by the causation you are attributing.
[...] a comment » I ran across these interesting data today showing a range of metrics for a few dozen of the most prominent American/International [...]
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Great resource! Thank you and I hope you continue this data gathering and tabulation in the future!
Thank you for publishing these statistics. Much of your site contains IB figures. What is the influence of the IB on these rankings? For example, are ANY of the schools on this list of highest scoring international schools, full IB schools? From what I can see, NONE of them are MYP schools. Why aren’t there any MYP schools on this list? Why is it that the highest achieving international schools continue to exclude the MYP from their programme?
To be completely honest, the lack of MYP wasn’t a significant factor in a school not being represented on this list. This began as a benchmarking study, and the only way to collect reliable data was to find and download each school’s High School Profile and then mine those profiles for the relevant data. In the future I hope to convince schools to participate voluntarily and cooperate – it really is useful data for schools. The upshot is that it may be that some very high performing schools have implemented the MYP program or are IB World Schools, but they don’t publish their results in their high school profiles. Or it could be as you seem to suggest: the MYP is not as strong a program as the IBDP, so good schools tend to prefer their own middle school curricula to the IBO’s branded version.
These rankings show just a snapshot of how students perform on an assessment. I agree they can be helpful in providing context, but I would offer (as would everyone else) that there are numerous factors that make a school successful. Adding to this current list (in addition to AP results) would be average length of stay of teachers and their respective years of experience. I would hypothesize that schools with relative higher results might have a longer length of teacher stay and years of experience (though an advanced degree and years of experience doesn’t automatically affect increased student results).
Sample sizes vary from 16 to 278. Makes it a bit unfair to compare. Would be good to correlate to schools of similar size
I think once we are able to solicit more data from more schools that will be possible. In the meantime, you can do a quick comparison of smaller schools by sorting the table by size of graduating class and then scrolling down. I also think it is interesting to look at how size *doesn’t* seem to correlate with other metrics or averages.
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Constructivism never gives a good education. It is a failed methodology.
It is mind boggling that any taxpayer would allow their money to be handed to the UN so the UN could brainwash their children with this poisonous program. I can’t imagine any American teacher who would agree to contribute to helping with this perfidy.
The program is aimed at children to brainwash them into the UN’s way of thinking about government. NO THANKS. Learn the truth about IB, where it comes from and what its goals and mission are here:
http://www.truthaboutib.com
http://www.channelingreality.com/Niwa/IB_unraveled_040610.htm
I’ll leave this comment up, but barely. I have no paranoid delusions that the IB is going to take over the world or that it is somehow an evil organization. It is certainly making mistakes, but it isn’t evil or insidious. The people behind “Truth About IB” are passionate and completely misled. If anyone wants to respond to them, go ahead.
One reason for the lack of strong correlation might relate to university application strategies, where a proportion of IB students are applying to both US and non US universities. Students get their US college acceptances in december/april and even (or especially) students with high sat scores may see little need to study hard for the IB exams in May, particularly if they have already got into their preferred school. If they are not applying outside the US, then additionally they have had no incentive to excel on EE or TOK since only their HL scores will be counted for university credit. Hence their IB scores end up being much lower relative to their SAT performance. On the other hand, students who might not have got into their preferred US university (some because of low sat scores or others because they applied only to “reach” schools in the US – with UK or Australia ones as their “safeties”), have a strong incentive to revise intensely for IB exams to meet their IB conditional offers from UK/Aus universities.They will then achieve higher IB scores than one would have expected from their SAT performance.
This is a great resource – thanks much for taking the time to put it together. I think it would also be interesting to see some data on which universities students went on to after graduating from the schools on this list.
Agreed. I considered putting that together as well. The problem is how schools report data – Many schools simply publish a huge list of all the schools that their students have been accepted to in the past five years. Some schools report which schools their students are accepted to, and star the ones they actually attend. Others don’t report any of this. Even with the list of universities, it isn’t clear how many students applied, how many were accepted, how many attended, etc. So, if I can figure out a way to make more schools more willing to actively share their data, your interest might someday be satisfied.
Editor, you have done a great job with this;I have been looking for something like this for sometime! My hats off to you.
One suggestion is to provide the full name of the school in the list and then list city last to reuce confusion. For example, in the 2010 ranking, Taipei American School(known as TAS) is listed as AST and Shanghai Community Interantional School(SCIS) as CISS while Shanghai American School is correctly listed as SAS. In the 2009 ranking however, AST is listed as TAS. As an alum from TAS, I lived in Taipei and Shanghai for practically all my life and have not heard of a AST or CISS but of TAS and SCIS respectively (or BISS, the British school?). If there is such a CISS school then providing a full name would be even more critical. Also, the provided links in the 2009 rankings do not work(at least on my computer, can someone confirm?)
Lastly,HS rankings are usually based on 2 things, SAT scores and University Matriculation (generally to be Ivy league + Stanford + MIT, poor U Chicago, Duke, Caltech!). Getting the matriculation data is extremely hard work and I would like to help!
What shocked me was the SAT scores that SCIS (here I am assuming it is your CISS) was getting but the matriculation of that schools does not correlate one bit to the SAT scores! That school is one underrated school based on your info, which probably shows that they have a weak college counseling team.
Once again, great work!
Thanks for the kind words, Delay, and the suggestions for improvements. It’s a work in progress, as you can see. It’s surprisingly difficult to organize and present data on the web if you have beginning-to-low programming skills. Also, schools don’t provide data, we (I have others who help) have to go out and get it and extract it from school profiles, which is a huge pain. There is a Google Form provided for schools to input their own data, but so far it is not in wide use. If I could get schools to provide the data, I would spend more time on nailing down the details. If you’re interested in helping with this project, email me directly: editor@wanderingacademic.com
Cheers!
Sorry for the syntax in the last entry. tried to find the edit button, but did not. Bad habit of proof-reading after posting.
I believe the last poster was mistaken in understanding the abbreviations. CISS is Concordia International School Shanghai http://www.concordiashanghai.org
Thanks! Found the school. But it also goes to show that putting the full name in the title would reduce confusion.