Talk:List of Auburn High School people

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BetacommandBot (talk) 06:33, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

These school rankings are dubious
The article says that Auburn was the 77th best public high school and the 28th best non-magnet school in 2006 according to Newsweek. Newsweek did say this (actually when I look at the Newsweek site I get 78th for 2006), but this is a misleading statistic for several reasons. From 2003 to 2008, Auburn's ranking was 238, 211, 78, 299, and finally 376 this year. So these rankings are not very stable. Moreover, Newsweek's formula is a debatable measure of merit. It calculates the number of AP exams (and similar) taken divided by the number of graduating seniors. This does give you some rough picture, but it means that a school ranks higher if it lets students drop out, than if those same students graduate without taking AP exams. It also takes no account of whether students do well on AP exams, only whether or not they take them.

The ranking by SchoolMatch is also questionable. SchoolMatch gives credit to a school if its teachers are paid less, and if area real estate is cheap, but its students still perform well. Again, their formula for student performance matters a lot, but this one isn't properly documented. Even if the formula were sound, and even if the ranking were stable, how much praise does a school deserve for the situation that they have in mind? It may be a logical reason to buy a house in the district. But if students do well in a school that's run on the cheap, then maybe the students and their families deserve more credit than the school itself.

Auburn High is a fine school and it's nice to have this page for it. But tossing around statistics loosely is a bad way to praise anything. Greg Kuperberg (talk) 17:47, 26 July 2008 (UTC)