Montgomery County fell from fifth place to sixth place this year in The Washington Post’s Challenge Index, the rankings of the college test participation rates with an average rating of 2.695.

Clarke County in Virginia came in first place, with an average rating of 4.535. The county’s average is only a 1.84 difference from Montgomery County’s average rating, meaning that Montgomery County is close behind the rest of the districts ahead. The more advanced Maryland/Virginia districts include Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Falls Church.

The Challenge Index, which will be turning ten years old in the spring, ranks schools locally in The Washington Post to show which schools and districts are doing the most to prepare students for their futures in college and schools are shown nationally in Newsweek.

Four schools in the Montgomery County district were featured on the area’s top ten in the Post’s annual Challenge Index list, more then any district in the state of Maryland. Also, college-level tests given in Montgomery County high schools this past year reached a record high of 25,920.

Montgomery County strongly encourages all students to take AP and IB classes including those exams. Because those exams are costly, any student that cannot afford the price requirement receives financial aid for the exams. Frederick County has a similar policy, but St. Mary’s County requires all students to take the AP exams and pays all of the exam fees for the students. They are the only district in the Maryland to do so.

Because, as The Washington Post said, “the formula is to divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other college-level tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in June," it only matters that many students take the exams; the scores don’t necessarily matter that much at all.

The Index was created by Washington Post writer Jay Matthews and has been the cause of many criticisms; some such critics include education analysts Andrew Rotherham and Sara Mead. They said, “(We) believe that the Challenge Index is a seriously flawed measure of overall quality.” Mead would prefer that the Index provides two separate indicators on what percentage of a school’s students took at least one AP test and the percentage of students taking test who passed them.

Rotherham says that a high dropout rate can actually help the ranking of the school on the index by changing the dominator when solved for. Therefore, when searching for a school, using the Index doesn’t necessarily mean ensure the quality of the school or education; it simply means that the school had several students take exams. Matthews continues to make amends and changes to his Index and strongly believes in it. He strongly believes that AP classes are very important. He wrote a Post article in 2006 titled “Why AP Matters,” here in Montgomery County.