[14] The school was ranked 197th in the nation and 15th in New Jersey on the list of "America's Best High Schools 2012" prepared by The Daily Beast / Newsweek, with rankings based primarily on graduation rate, matriculation rate for college and number of Advanced Placement / International Baccalaureate courses taken per student, with lesser factors based on average scores on the SAT / ACT, average AP/IB scores and the number of AP/IB courses available to students.
[16] Since the school's opening in 1999, West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North's Debate League is a top competitor in regional debate tournaments and competitions, including Princeton Moot Court, New Jersey Mock Trial, and the Colonial Valley Conference.
Prior in 2011, High School North also won the Spring Moot Court tournament at Princeton University and since then has had its members regularly rank among the top competitors.
[17] North advanced to the Science Olympiad national tournament after winning the New Jersey state competition 5 times, in 2008, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2023 and placed 9th, 16th, 11th, 8th and 15th respectively.
[23] In 2009, Timothy Cornell was selected as a winner of the 2009 Edyth May Sliffe Award for distinguished high school mathematics teaching, presented by the Mathematical Association of America, one of 22 teachers throughout high schools in the United States and Canada to be selected for the award.
[24] The West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North Knights[3] participate in the Colonial Valley Conference, which is comprised of public and private high schools in Mercer, Middlesex and Monmouth counties, and operates under the supervision of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association.
Given that the size of the schools is larger than the threshold established by the state for co-op programs (North is classified as Group III and South as Group IV, based on the size of the enrollment of each school), the proposal was rejected by the West Jersey Football League and by the Leagues and Conferences Committee of the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association, before an appeal of the decision was rejected by the Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education.
In 2007, the boys' soccer team won the Central Jersey Group III state championship with a 3-0 win over Red Bank Regional High School in the tournament final.
[35] The boys soccer team, under the direction of coach Trevor Warner, repeated as Central Jersey Group III Champions when they beat Wall Township in the sectional final, finishing the season with a 19-2 record, the best in school history.
In 2008, they defeated Wall High School by a score of 2-1, becoming the first team from the Colonial Valley Conference to win back-to-back sectional finals.
That win propelled them to a berth in the Nike Cross-Country National Championships (NXN), where they finished 5th, which was the best a New Jersey team had ever done until that time.
[43] In 2009, the team followed up the successful 2008 campaign, and the graduation of four top runners, by finishing 3rd in the New Jersey Meet of Champions and 4th at Nike Nationals Northeast.
WW-P North became just the 5th program in state history to finish top-5 at the Meet of Champions four years in a row (Haddonfield, Christian Brothers Academy, Don Bosco, and Westfield were the other teams).