Californians Score High on Advanced Placement Tests : Education: Three times as many pass as in ’84. Class of ’91 ranks sixth in the nation on qualifying scores.

Despite their growing ethnic and economic diversity, California’s high school students have made their strongest showing ever on the rigorous system of Advanced Placement examinations, the officials who administer the exams nationwide said Thursday.

California’s Class of 1991, which took the exams in the spring, ranked at or near the top in several categories that are used to gauge student success, College Board officials said at a news conference in San Francisco.

The Advanced Placement tests, offered in 29 subject areas, enable high school juniors and seniors who earn passing scores of 3 or higher to earn college credits.

The state, the nation’s most populous, accounted for the largest numbers of exams taken--75,087 in public schools alone, with 48,958 of the tests, or 65%, producing qualifying, or passing, scores. That represents an increase over the previous year, 1989-90, when only about 46,000 exams produced qualifying scores.

It also led in the numbers of minority students who took the exams. Including private and public schools, 39,144 minority high school students took the tests in at least one subject area, a 62% increase from the 24,091 exams taken by minorities in 1988.

The College Board also recognizes individual students as national Advanced Placement scholars. These students have taken more than one exam and earned high scores. Of the 13 nationwide, seven were from California.

The state ranked sixth in the nation in the proportion of its juniors and seniors who took the exams and sixth in the proportion who earned qualifying scores.

College Board officials said their Advanced Placement tests, along with the courses designed to prepare students to take them, have played a role in raising academic achievement and aspirations among high school students.

“Schools that offer AP courses are making achievement a clear priority, and sending a message that their students, teachers and administrators are taking risks and striving to go well beyond what is expected of them,” said Donald M. Stewart, College Board president.

Statewide, 20.1% of seniors who took the exams last year earned qualifying marks. By contrast, only 7.2% did so in the Class of 1984, the year the Department of Education launched statewide education reform efforts.

“This is very positive news about student performance--we’ve almost tripled our qualifying rate in the last seven years,” said state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who joined Stewart at the press conference. Noting that increasing numbers of students have limited English language skills or suffer from the effects of poverty and other problems, Honig called the gains “a real tribute to our students, their families and their schools.”

The news was especially sweet for the mammoth, 86% minority Los Angeles Unified School District, where one in five students lives in poverty and about a third are not proficient in English. The district’s seniors’ qualifying rate of 25.8% was comfortably above the state average of 20.1% and represented a 128% increase over the 11.3% who passed in 1984.

The district often scores below the state average in other testing, such as the California Achievement Program.

The passing rate for public high schools in Los Angeles County was 26.7%, up from 1984’s 9.4%.

All minority groups in the state made gains, although Honig expressed concern that those made by black students were not as strong as for other groups. Between 1985--the first year data was available by ethnic group--and 1991, the qualifying rate for American Indians rose from 3.4% to 9.3%, while that for Asians shot from 19.2% to 44.4%. The rate for blacks went from 1.1% to 3.2%, while that of Latinos climbed from 2.7% to 11.1%. Among whites, the rate rose from 8.6% to 17.2%.

Honig attributed the gains to schools’ encouraging more students to take the Advanced Placement classes, which typically are smaller and enable teachers to give more individual attention. He said he was concerned that the public schools, facing reduced state funding in the wake of a stubborn recession, may not be able to continue funding the programs.

Although students must pay $65 to the college board for each test they take, qualifying marks can help reduce college costs because students do not have to take as many courses. A few states pay the test fees for students who cannot afford them, but financially strapped California does not do so.

California recipients of the national scholar awards were Edwin C. Chan of Torrance, Steven W. Huang of Irvine, Richard K. Kent of San Diego, Eugenia N. Kim of Arcadia, Larry K. Lee of San Diego, Robin C. Peters of Burbank and Jason M. Waanders of Encinitas.

The Advanced Placement tests gained wider public awareness from the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver,” which told the story of former Garfield High School teacher Jaime Escalante’s dramatic success in preparing his Latino students to pass the AP calculus exam.

L.A. COUNTY SCORES: B2