Florida virtual school is lying to you about how well they are doing

From the Tampa Bay Times Grade Book

by Jeff Solochek

Florida Virtual's claim on 2011 AP passage rates based on fuzzy math

Yesterday, The Gradebook received an email press release from Florida Virtual School that stated that among its students taking the 2011 Advanced Placement tests "58 percent" passed with scores of 3,4 or 5. (See the full press release below).

During our reporting for our Jan. 8 story on Florida Virtual School, we shared the school's 2011 AP scores in their raw form, based on the figures the school sent us. Those numbers showed that the actual passage rate for all students was 54.3 percent. (You can see those for yourself here, by clicking on "Student Success," then clicking on "Advanced Placement," then scrolling all the way to the bottom to the last item, where you can open up a spreadsheet showing students' individual 2011 scores.)

The discrepancy in the scores seems to be this: Florida Virtual is averaging its subject averages, resulting in an overall passage rate that looks higher than it actually is. When we looked back at the school's promotional material over the years, we found the school has a habit of doing this. (You can see examples of that in the Power Point presentations the school sent us, also downloadable from the same spot you found the raw test scores I described above.)

To explain this fuzzy math, here's an example from the data: 71 students took AP Spanish Language test and 94.6 percent of them scored a 3 or higher; and 330 students (more than four times as many!) took the AP U.S. Government and Politics test and 49.3 percent of them scored a 3 or higher. But under the school's calculations, that 94.6 percent and 49.3 percent weigh the same in the overall average.

Sure, 58 percent sounds nicer than 54 percent, but not by that much. Still, the difference of four percentage points means the difference between whether Florida Virtual can say its students did better on average -- or about as well as -- than the national average or not. According to our calculations, which compared the state and national averages on the basis of the raw scores in the same subjects that Florida Virtual offered, Florida Virtual students actually scored better than the state averages in those subjects, but not better than the national average.

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/florida-virtuals-claim-2011-ap-passage-rates-based-fuzzy-math