West Shore’s AP scores have shown massive improvement in pass rates schoolwide amid lowering state college acceptance rate, keeping its students in a good spot to compete for college admissions.

“I think last year is the highest we’ve ever had, but it’s usually in the mid 70s,” testing coordinator Rebecca Matoska said. “I do know we’re above the average high school in terms of passing. “We’re much higher than a public school of similar kind of town size.”

Up by more than 8 percent from the 2020-21 school year, last year’s pass rate saw a dramatic increase to 80.5 percent, well above rival Edgewood’s Jr/Sr High School’s 69 percent, as recorded on usnews.com.

With the COVID pandemic, more and more students have pooled into Floridian colleges, causing acceptance rates of many to drop due to the increase of applications, affecting colleges such as Florida State University, University of Florida and University of Central Florida.

Matoska said acceptance to a Florida university has grown more difficult in recent years.

“It’s not just good SAT scores and a bunch of AP classes that you did well in, and membership in NHS,” she said. “That’s not enough anymore to ensure admission to even UCF. [It used to be] as long as you applied there, you were going to get in and you were going to graduate.” 

In the past three years, UCF’s admission rate has dropped from 44.5 percent in 2019 to roughly 36 percent in 2022, pushing some like sophomore Jalaya King to take more AP classes as opposed to dual-enrollment courses.

“Colleges to me don’t really care about honors or non-honors, they mostly just care about your GPA and how you excel in your classes,” King said, adding that AP classes are college credit classes.

By Emily Marshall