As college students finish up their first semester, it's not just time to take a break, it's also time to look at grades and study how well their college career is going. But it's not just an individual assessment -- it's also an assessment of how well their K-12 schooling prepared them to compete in the world beyond high school.

According to Madison School Board member Ed Hughes, information from students is one of the most important ways to test how effective schools or school districts are serving their communities.

"Probably the best single source of information about how well we're doing comes from students themselves, and how well-prepared they feel when they go out into the world," says Hughes, a board member since 2008 as well as an attorney and a parent.

Earlier this year, Hughes -- who has a daughter who is a senior at East High School and a son who has graduated from college -- did an informal survey of students who had graduated from the Madison Metropolitan School District and were now either in college, graduate school or the work force. The 143 respondents ranged from the graduating classes of 1999 through 2008; most had graduated from Madison schools within the last five years.

While Hughes notes that the survey was anecdotal and non-scientific, he says it yielded some interesting insights about Madison's high schools. Students across the district said the diverse makeup of their schools has been an advantage for them in later years, for example. Most said they were well-prepared for college.

Casey Wilson is an example of both.

Wilson, who responded to the survey, graduated from Memorial High School in 2005 and later attended both the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He graduated and is now working at a lab at Columbia University in New York. His next step is dental school.

"Overall, I felt pretty well-prepared for college, especially in science and English," he said in a recent phone interview. "Generally, the quality of the courses was pretty dependent on the instructor. I felt my math classes at Memorial were really rigorous, but I had friends who didn't have the same experience."

He encouraged students to participate in extracurricular activities because he found that his experiences in band and football, among others, introduced him to people from many different backgrounds. "When I got to the University of Minnesota I didn't have much of an adjustment to make to the diversity in the Twin Cities. That was a big advantage I had over some students I knew from smaller communities."

Wilson's contention that a diverse high school was good preparation for life was repeatedly and enthusiastically echoed by other students at all Madison high schools. In response to the survey question: "To what extent, if any, do you think that your attending a relatively diverse high school was beneficial to you?" the vast majority of students reported that attending a diverse urban school helped them feel comfortable no matter where they landed. Many talked about the difference between the "real world" and a sheltered life, and many said they hoped to send their children to schools like the ones they attended here.

But there were also a handful of comments from students at each school saying they felt intimidated or annoyed by students who were not motivated academically and who posed safety problems. One clearly unhappy former student wrote: "I would not send my kids to Madison public schools. The lack of respect for the learning environment is disgraceful."

Based on student comments in the surveys, a picture of each school emerges that's quite distinctive.

For example, many students who attended East praised the rigor of the math department, the excellence of the French department and the benefits they got from taking band or biology. But others expressed disappointment with their English classes and said they felt somewhat unprepared to write well in college.

In contrast, West High School's writing workshop drew high praise, over and over again, from surveyed students.

Lauren Gillman, a 2007 West graduate who is in her junior year at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities as a food science major, raved about her writing classes at West in a telephone interview.

"Taking the writing workshop at West prepared me for writing anything, at any level, in college," Gillman says. "I really learned to set up paragraphs, prove my thesis, self-edit....I can't imagine any better English training, and I was kind of shocked at how many students don't have this background."

Gillman gave similar high marks to her high school biotechnology class, which she says was so good that much of what she studied in college in a similar class was a review.

Her only mild complaint academically was that she may have been less prepared for standardized testing that some of her college peers. She notes that West offers relatively few advanced placement (AP) classes. "They might have done a better job for me by offering some more AP classes so that I could have learned more about taking rigorous standardized tests. Overall, though, I was really happy with my education," she says.

Unlike Gillman, Julia Haslanger, currently a senior in journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, had a number of AP classes when she went to high school at La Follette.

In a recent interview by telephone from Missouri, Haslanger said, "Generally, my classes in high school prepared me quite well for college. I have to say the AP classes were really a help."

For example, she took an AP statistics class at La Follette, but because she didn't want to pay the $95 fee to take the test at the end of the course to see if she could get college credit, she wound up taking a college-level statistics class, too.

"I got an A or an A+, I can't remember. The best part was that there was an 8 a.m. lecture and by the second or third week I knew I didn't have to go to every lecture because for me it was all a review," she recalls with a laugh.

But there were also some holes in her education at La Follette.

"I didn't know how to write much of a scientific paper, and I think I didn't have some of the networking skills some other students had gotten at other Madison high schools through student council or working with teachers and administrators," she says. "Maybe it was because our school administration was in such transition during my years there but I remember feeling a little disconnected."

Haslanger is another student who cites the diversity of her high school as a plus.

"In college I've gotten to know many students with a prep school background who have no experience with anyone outside of their own social group. I got to know students of all kinds at La Follette, including Hmong students who were getting married in high school. I liked learning about other cultures and ways of seeing the world. That's a good thing to take with you to college, and I think it serves you well," she says.

Hughes says he was surprised by how eager students were to respond to the survey. "It's clear they wanted to share their experiences and many of them still have a strong identification with their high school experience."

He enlisted the help of West parent Jeff Henriques of the University of Wisconsin's psychology department in developing some of the survey questions. Henriques also helped post the survey online. In just a couple of weeks, Hughes had responses from 55 former East students, 53 West students, 26 Memorial students and nine La Follette students.

"This wasn't a representative sample of the district by any means, but it does provide some information we wouldn't otherwise have," Hughes says. "I had always thought -- and still do -- that we don't gather enough information from our students to see how we can improve, and how they see our strengths and weaknesses as a district."

Hughes calls the survey a "trial run," saying he hopes the Madison school district will do more official data gathering like this in the future. "I'm not really sure how to proceed from here or how to expand a survey like this, but I think this kind of information is very useful," he says.

Kurt Kiefer, director of information for the Madison school district, agrees. Kiefer notes that a comprehensive strategic plan that the School Board recently approved specifically calls for post-graduate follow-up.

"With all the digital feedback mechanisms we have now, and the willingness that students have to use them, staying in touch with our graduates is something we will be doing more of in the future. We're already in the preliminary planning stages," Kiefer says.

When the Madison school district does begin officially surveying its graduates, it will likely be part of a broader effort across Wisconsin to gather more data about student performance. Just last month, following President Barack Obama's Madison kick-off of Race to the Top education reforms, the Wisconsin Legislature passed a bill requiring the state's Department of Public Instruction, the University of Wisconsin System and Wisconsin technical colleges to establish a system for tracking student performance, from pre-kindergarten through post-secondary education.