Northwood students can join countless extracurricular activities, from Academic Decathlon and Biology Olympiad to Knitwork and Culinary. However, Niche’s C+ rating of Northwood’s clubs and activities conveys the opposite message. This barely-passing grade severely undermines the numerous well-established organizations that Northwood students have worked so hard to develop.
Niche, an organization that creates holistic school profiles based on public data and user reviews, awarded Northwood an overall score of A+. Northwood remains the sixth best public high school in Orange County, making the disproportionate score for clubs and activities all the more shocking.
According to Niche, the grade methodology for clubs and activities is broken down into four categories: parent/student surveys on extracurriculars (50%), resources and facilities grade (30%), sports grade (10%) and student-teacher ratio (10%).
A significant portion of the grade is reliant on self-reported student and parent surveys, which are vulnerable to biases like voluntary response bias that causes oversampling of those with strong opinions. Most students and parents who take the time to complete an online survey are likely to have extreme opinions about the subject and skew the data.
The very definition of “self-reported” means that not the entire student body is surveyed, excluding the majority of Northwood students who may not have known about Niche surveys or had the time to fill them out because the surveys aren’t mandatory or widely publicized.
Because of this, Niche’s methodology could also be guilty of non-response bias, where non-responders in a sample have opinions that differ significantly from respondents.
The same issues apply to the other categories, as survey responses make up a large portion of each score breakdown. Northwood’s resources and facilities grade is also a C+, and while IUSD does receive less funding than the national average, the resources available to students on campus are still high-quality and accessible.
“Northwood’s facilities are incredible,” Science Olympiad co-captain and varsity tennis captain senior Joelle Cheeseman said. “There’s the College and Career center, the Wellness Center and so many people that you could go to if you need advice on your career or school classes. Also, the school is beautiful, and all the equipment works. There’s just everything you could ever need.”
There are currently 126 clubs on campus and 15 sports–all with at least one coach or advisor– for students to join, as well as a variety of other electives, many of which are open-enrollment. Most activities are easily accessible and well-established, with many competition-based clubs frequently winning awards.
“I think that there are so many clubs and so many extracurriculars that you can do on campus that if I’ve ever wondered like, ‘Oh, I wonder if we have this,’ there’s no way that we don’t have it,” Baik said. “Somebody will know, and they will tell me. I don’t think we’ve ever been deprived of activities.”
While there is always room for improvement, clubs and activities are integral to Northwood culture and deserve positive acknowledgement. Rather than determining the worth of extracurriculars on campus through arbitrary organizations such as Niche, the quality of student life should be determined by students themselves.
