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The biggest change to this year’s high school progress reports, being released this morning, won’t affect schools’ scores.

In a nod to the growing recognition that a high school diploma does not guarantee college success, the Department of Education is adding three “college readiness” data points to the annual reports. They will calculate the percentages of students who passed college-level exams or courses; who would not require remedial courses at CUNY colleges; and who enroll in college the fall after they graduate. Starting next year, those figures will factor in to schools’ final grades, but this year the department is including them for informational purposes only.

Another change to the reports does reflect the growing focus on the quality of high school work — and is factored into the results. The credit accumulation metric, which looks at how many courses each student passed, has been narrowed to focus on classes completed in the core subjects of English, math, social studies, and science. In the past, a student was counted as having appropriately accumulated credits if he passed 10 classes, regardless of what they were. Now, at least six of the classes have to be in the core subjects.

One thing that won’t be on the reports: credit recovery numbers. Since last year, the department has been collecting data on the number of students who receive credit through non-traditional means after failing a class. The practice is sanctioned in policy but has been accused of being abused at some high schools, where students have been awarded credit after doing only minimal work.

Another change will help some schools relax. In the past, a high-performing high school could theoretically get a failing grade on its progress report. Now, schools whose graduation rate is in the top third citywide — about 80 percent in four years —  will not be able to score lower than a C. Scores of D or F, or three C’s in a row, put schools at risk of closure, according to the department’s guidelines.

The department has also ended the practice of splitting the data points of students who transfer schools across both schools’ progress reports. Now, the students who are on the register Oct. 31 are the ones whose grades, scores, and attendance will count on the year’s progress report. An advantage of this change, according to the department’s explanation of methodological changes, is that schools won’t be penalized for taking “over-the-counter” students late in the year.

Just as on the elementary and middle school progress reports that came out last month, the high school reports will for the first time award extra credit for moving students with disabilities to less-restrictive environments, a priority of a special education initiative that is mid-rollout, and posting gains among the low-scoring black and Latino male students who are the focus of the city’s Young Men’s Initiative. The city is also giving extra credit for gains made by students who were considered English language learners or who were in restrictive special education settings within the last five years, even if they no longer are.

All of the tweaks make it surprising that some elements of the reports — like the score ranges for each letter grade and the formula that assigns schools to a “peer group” — did not change at all.

And taken together, the changes mean that there can’t be a perfect comparison between this year’s scores and last year’s. Still, more than the elementary and middle school reports, which are based mainly on single math and reading test scores, the high school reports offer a peek into the experience that each school offers. And because they include a variety of data points, sharp year-to-year changes should be seen as grounds for further investigation, rather than the product of built-in variation. A school whose score jumps dramatically might really have improved substantially — or found a way to look like it has. This year, the city launched audits at 60 schools whose scores reflected suspicious patterns, so sharp drops could be more likely than ever to reflect the effects of new scrutiny.