<p>Wait - on this year’s exam, will we be penalized for wrong answers?</p>
<p>The new grading policy doesn’t go into effect until 2011’s sets of tests, so we will be penalized for this year’s exams.</p>
<p>The AP Annual Conference is July 14-18. Perhaps they’re making the big announcement there.</p>
<p>I will be interested to hear what the College Board has to say about the changes. An official statement would be nice.</p>
<p>
Official? Where? O__o</p>
<p>Reading it on that website is no different than reading it on here. It’s meaningless.</p>
<p>Nothing official has been announced yet.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s official unless College Board (or the AP Program or some other organization running AP) announces it.</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m still waiting to hear from the College Board.</p>
<p>Guys - take a look at any of the Official Fall 2010 Course Description booklets. I quoted directly (Post 51 on page 4 of this thread) from the AP US History booklet. It is official. I agree. It is very odd that we all found out on College Confidential and not directly from the College Board. But the fact is the change is official.</p>
<p>What’s weird is this: The quote from the APUSH Course Description about the new MC scoring formula is also in the AP Euro Course Description but is in neither the AP French Course Description nor the AP Physics Course Description.</p>
<p>^ I think they just didn’t update it. They have a corrected physics curve posted on the Collegeboard Store site.</p>
<p>yea its official because its on official collegeboard documents</p>
<p>wow :-O</p>
<p>Quite an interesting change. </p>
<p>Still, they’ll just readjust the curves so I doubt it’ll be too big of a deal.</p>
<p>Hm. Interesting!
This could either be a) very good, b) very bad, or c) none of the above. </p>
<p>But no props to CB for not sending out some official notification of some sort!</p>
<p>Three Questions:</p>
<ol>
<li>Why hasn’t the CB made an official announcement?</li>
<li>How will this affect the percentage of 5s and 4s?</li>
<li>What motivated the CB to make this change?</li>
</ol>
<p>1) It’s possible that they have notified teachers via private communication. Plus, it’s in the course description guides. It’s not like they’re keeping it a secret… but they really should make a conspicuous announcement.</p>
<p>2) It shouldn’t, too much, because don’t they design the curve to create somewhat of an even distribution of scores, as much as possible without heavily skewing the scores?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Most plausible explanation. The precentages will be the same - it’ll just shift the curve rightward because people should get more points on average. I think this was done to compete with the ACT and will eventually expand to SAT/SAT2. It’s a business move.</p>
<p>Very good point.</p>
<p>The curves will have to become a little tougher with no penalty for guessing: a “5” on the 2011 test should still correspond to an “A” college grade, just as it did on the 2010 test. Before, if you had 10 MC questions to go with 30 seconds left, on average you would gain nothing by guessing. Now, on average, you would pick up 2 more points with ten random guesses.</p>
<p>I can’t speak for other subject areas, but calculus teachers received notification of the two changes in the calculus examinations (no penalty for wrong multiple choice answers, slight modification to calculator usage in the free response) via e-mail posted to the AP Calculus e-mail list.</p>
<p>There are scheduled AP institutes throughout the country over the summer, and I’ll be attending one the first week of July. My suspicion is that the change will also be discussed there.</p>
<p>The number of people getting 1s and 2s has been increasing, this seems like a sort of counter measure</p>