<p>I'll tell you now that um, they couldn't have taken just raw # of APs into consideration. My school offers, at max, 4 APs -- and 2 of them you can only take senior year and we made #7, which is ridiculous. Most people end up taking 2 or 3 AP classes total (Calc AB or BC, Stat, and a choice of EITHER Chem, Physics, or Bio).</p>
<p>Of course, we're also ridiculous and do classes on our own and take the AP on our own, but that's nothing to do with the school.</p>
<p>The description of their methodology indicates that they take into account performance of less affluent and minority students before looking at the number of AP's and performance on those exams. This suggests that some schools didn't make it to the point of measuring AP's. I didn't find a precise description of their formula but it looks like that the more diverse a schools is will impact whether it makes the list or the top 100. I also saw no mention of IB.</p>
<p>I strongly suspect there are a group of schools between schools on the list with very homogenous school populations in very affluent areas and very diverse schools in lower income areas that fail their first level test that would otherwise be very highly ranked. Based on my fuzzy knowledge of schools in CT, NJ, and Westchester County I think that is why some well known names are not on any of the lists.</p>
<p>There did seem to me to be only a small number of non-magnet public high schools in the top 100 as well. Quite silly to compare Thomas Jefferson to your basic open admission public school.</p>
<p>The Newsweek list uses only the number of AP/IB exams take by all grades/graduating Seniors. That list excludes magnet/restricted admission schools which is perhaps the biggest difference in the methods.</p>