More than half of MCPS graduates in the class of 2013 earned college-ready scores on at least one Advanced Placement exam and a couple Bethesda high schools played a large role.
On Tuesday, the College Board released data on the AP exams for the entire country. A score of 3 on the 5-point scale for the exams is considered college ready. Different universities have different policies for providing college credits based on those scores. Most offer college credit for students who get a score of 4 or 5 on the exams.
Students in the class of 2013 at Walt Whitman and Winston Churchill led the way, with 83.5 percent of students at both schools earning a score of 3 or higher on at least one AP exam.
Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School was one of two in MCPS to see increases in AP exam participation and performance among black and Hispanic graduates. Rockville High School was the other.
B-CC had 68.1 percent of its 2013 graduating class get a 3 on at least one exam, up from 65.9 percent in the class of 2012. Walter Johnson’s percentage of graduating students to get a 3 on at least one exam fell to 69 percent from 71.7 percent.
The county average was 51.4 percent, a decrease of 0.9 percentage points from the graduating class of 2012 but much higher than the state of Maryland average of 29.6 percent or the national average of 20.1 percent.
Maryland was the highest performing state in the College Board’s report. MCPS accounted for 18 percent of the state’s graduates and 31 percent of its graduates who got a 3 or higher on at least one exam.
See the MCPS AP exam results in depth here.
