AIMS Annual Report Card for Atlantic Canadian High Schools

AIMS' Annual Report Card on Atlantic Canadian High Schools grades schools based on two categories – Achievement and Engagement – but there is a lot of information that is used to determine those grades. Academic Achievement is an indicator of overall academic success and uses school and provincial exam marks in math, science, language arts, and humanities courses, and achievement in post-secondary studies or training. Academic Engagement is an indicator of student commitment to and enthusiasm for their education, and is determined using attendance rates, pass rates, enrollment in post-secondary preparatory courses in math and language arts, and whether students from the school move on to post-secondary education.

However, it is understood that education can be affected by various factors that are outside a school’s control. In order to level the playing field for schools in different settings, AIMS uses ‘input data’ that includes enrollment, pupil teacher ratio, teacher training and socio-economic status to provide an ‘In Context” grade. 

The Final grade for each school is calculated by averaging the Overall Absolute grade and the Overall In Context grade.

The Absolute grade assesses a school’s performance relative to the rest of the schools in the province. The In Context grade measures how well a school performs considering the variables that are generally beyond the school’s control.

Schools for which we were not able to secure a complete data set are not given a final overall grade and are listed alphabetically as unranked. So if your school doesn’t get an overall grade, check through the measures where there is a grade to find out what’s happening.

INPUTS

• High School Enrolment: the number of students enrolled in high school grades.
• Pupil Teacher Ratio: the ratio of all students to full-time equivalent teachers.
• Average Teacher Certification: an indicator of the average level of education possessed by the teachers in a school.
• Socio-Economic Status: the socio-economic status uses a number of measures to capture the social and economic conditions of a school’s student population.
• Feeder achievement: an indicator of the performance of junior high or middle school students who go on to attend each high school.

OUTCOMES

Academic Achievement

• School marks: the average teacher-assigned grades for general, academic and advanced level courses in math, science, language arts and humanities.
• Provincial exams: the average grade on provincial exams including math, science, language arts and humanities.
• Post-secondary achievement: is an indicator of the comparative academic success of post-secondary students from Atlantic Canadian high schools in their first year of study at 21 of Atlantic Canada’s universities and community colleges.

Academic Engagement

• Attendance: the attendance rate of high school students.
• Moving-on: based on the number of students who move from one grade to the next grade. The Grade 12 moving-on rate is calculated by dividing the number of graduating students by the number enrolled in Grade 12 at the beginning of the year.
• Post-secondary preparation: the proportion of students participating in college preparatory math and language arts courses.
• Post-secondary participation: the proportion of students moving on, or intending to move on, to post-secondary education the year after graduation.

To view AIMS' Annual Report Cards on Atlantic Canadian High Schools, please refer to the links on the left-hand side of this page.