By JOY LEIKER

jleiker@muncie.gannett.com

(Published Friday, Nov. 20 2009) Muncie Community Schools is pushing its top students to achieve more, and inside Advanced Placement classrooms, it’s working.

These are the toughest courses high school students can take. From English to biology to chemistry to U.S. history, students are expected to do more than just read and absorb a textbook. And at the end of the year, students are eligible to take an AP exam on the subject matter. If they earn at least a 3 (the top score is 5), then that high school class earns them college credit.

AP courses also are weighted, which means they count more when figured into a student’s grade-point average.

“It just gives them a glimpse of what college will be like,” said Jackie Samuels, associate principal at Central High School.

At Central, 40 percent of the 101 students who took the AP exams scored at least a 3 on the test. It’s nearly double the 21 percent of students who did that well in 2008.

At Southside, the number of students who took the AP test more than doubled. And their scores improved too, with 20 percent scoring high enough to earn college credit, up from 16 percent a year earlier.

Juniors Alicia Henman and Jamie Davis like the challenge. In their first-period AP biology class, they worked as a team to track how cells reproduce. Craft sticks decorated with matching lines represented like cells, and the girls moved the sticks across the table top at each step in the process. Their quiet cheers interrupted the silence as they figured it out along the way. They said in unison, “Yeah! Two cells!”

All the while, teacher Wes Lyon walked through the classroom. This is the first of three AP biology classes he teaches every day.

“They’re expected to figure things out on their own,” Lyon said. He estimated that 75 percent of the work students do is dependent on their own recognition and comprehension.