Students in Pierson High School’s International Baccalaureate program are excelling on the local and international levels, school officials said this week.
Michael Guinan, Pierson High’s assistant principal, presented scores and diploma statistics at a meeting Monday night of the Sag Harbor School Board. One of the highlights, he said, was that for the first time since implementing the program in 2014, all of the candidates earned the diploma.
Enrollment in the program varies by class year; 11 seniors achieved this distinction last year.
The International Baccalaureate (I.B.) courses are the most rigorous that Pierson has to offer its students, who gain and apply skills in critical thinking, research and analysis, high-level writing, global contexts, community service, and more.
Some students during the 2023-24 school year also earned some of the highest I.B. diploma scores in the world.
“This past year,” Mr. Guinan said, “we had the second, third, and fourth students ever to exceed 40 points on the diploma” in school history.
In the I.B. system, a cumulative score of at least 24 points is needed to achieve the diploma outright. The highest possible score is 42, drawn from taking six exams that are graded from 1 to 7. Mr. Guinan displayed a graph showing the worldwide average score sits at about 30, while in 2024 Pierson’s average score climbed to about 33.
“This sets a really high bar for us,” Mr. Guinan said. He also added that the schools in Europe and Asia that help establish this average are mostly private schools and are “highly selective.”
Daniel Marsili, a school board member, noted that many students in those schools “come up through middle school programs” and therefore “are much more familiar with an I.B. structure.” He also pointed out that Pierson students “have to jump-start themselves, which really shows this data is maybe even better than it perhaps appears.”
Pierson previously entertained adding the I.B. Middle Years program, but opted instead to develop its own version of a rigorous middle school curriculum.
Mr. Guinan pointed out other achievements of Pierson’s I.B. students as well. For only the second time, a Pierson student scored a 7 on the I.B. literature test, and for the second and third time, students scored a 7 on the I.B. chemistry test. Additionally, 88 percent of scores on 2024 I.B. tests registered as “passing” with a 4 or better. This is the highest passing score percentage in Pierson history, excepting the 2019-20 school year, when the grading was altered because of the pandemic.
Matt Malone and Brittany Carriero, respectively the principals of Sag Harbor Elementary School and Pierson Middle and High School, also touched on students’ successes on other standardized tests. For instance, the school’s scores on both the 2024 New York State Math and English Language Arts tests, for students in third through eighth grade, are about 20 percent higher than the state average.
Also in 2024, 100 percent of the eighth-grade students who took the algebra 1 Regents exam passed it. There was a high pass rate for every other Regents exam — between the upper 80s and high 90s, with 100 percent of students also passing the physics and algebra 2 exams.
Keeping track of this data is helpful to the district in multiple ways. “We’re using it as a piece of the picture: what our classes, grade levels, and schools are doing in terms of the state’s expectations and how our individual students are doing,” he said. “If writing is an area that needs specific intervention, we will target that at specific grade levels.”
Jeff Nichols, the district superintendent, noted it’s also important to look beyond test scores. “We always want to recognize that this is just one measure of our students,” he said. “There are so many other things that makes someone a Pierson graduate that we’re proud of.”