<p>“How do those foreign schools accomplish that without that great AP crutch?”</p>
<p>Many of them follow some type of board exams which have a standard curriculum to follow. They flunk lots of people from going beyond the 12th grade level.</p>
<p>By the same token, most foreign universities don’t much care for US high school diplomas. They prefer to see AP/IB scores as a validation of a real education in America.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>They often have their own externally imposed academic standards (A-levels in the British system, preparation for college entrance examinations in other countries, or just high standards set at the national or state/provincial level, etc.).</p>
<p>The AP “mission creep” is not a good thing, but in the absence of it, the state of K-12 education in the US would likely be even worse, as there appears to be little motivation to raise overall standards for everyone.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Because the academic track high schools in many foreign countries don’t have the mission to educate as large of a spectrum of students as US public high schools. </p>
<p>Many of the countries with better educational outcomes track students far more severely and have no hesitation to segment out students on the basis of academic level and/or behavioral/degree of being difficult to teach. </p>
<p>And like the US, the best teachers prefer teaching students who are “easy to teach” in your words and IME…aren’t ashamed to say so. </p>
<p>There’s also a greater sense that it’s just as much/more the student’s job to make him/herself “easy to teach”. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In practice, most of the “flunking out” starts at the end of middle school in many countries where exams, grades, and/or teacher evaluations determine whether students continue on the college-oriented academic track, various vocational training/apprenticeship programs…some of which are highly competitive, or sometimes the expectation the student starts working from end of middle school onward. </p>
<p>Moreover, if one exhibits what’s considered “anti-social” or violent disruptive behavior in school or especially in class, there’s far less hesitation in expelling such students and placing them in reform schools or in the case of one older Japanese friend*…effectively barring them from further education because they’re perceived as a serious security risk to other students, teachers, and staff. </p>
<p>That’s in great contrast to what I’ve observed here in the US where violently disruptive students are allowed to run amuck in class** and in one serious case…idiotic local educrats/board members appealing a court ruling to keep a convicted felon out of school even after 2 judges ruled he was too serious of a security risk to be allowed back into the high school. </p>
<ul>
<li>Was tossed out in 7th grade despite excellent grades for being involved in one schoolyard fight. Ended up being barred from continuing his education and disowned by his family. Ended up working several years in odd/unskilled factory jobs before a lucky break with a benefactor who felt he deserved a second chance got him sent to the US to finish his middle, high school, and undergrad education. When I met him, he was a 26 year old college senior about to graduate from a respectable US university with flying colors.</li>
</ul>
<p>** My experience in public middle school in NYC where some teachers/admins not only refused to do anything about bullying, but went so far as to blame the bullied victims for “not understanding where the [bullies] are coming from”. <em>Eyeroll</em> Ended up having to settle it ourselves in a series of afterschool fights.</p>
<p>Someone is playing with the numbers.</p>
<p>There are only 3.5 million HS Graduates in he US.</p>
<p>[Fast</a> Facts](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372]Fast”>Fast Facts: Back-to-school statistics (372))</p>
<p>Only 950K graduates (rnd) take the exam </p>
<p>[Class</a> of 2012 Advanced Placement® Results Announced](<a href=“News and Press Releases - Newsroom | College Board”>Class of 2012 Advanced Placement® Results Announced – Newsroom)</p>
<p>The population in question does not support a 1.3 million fail rate. It appears that to goose up the number the article considers a 3 a fail. If so another clear example of manipulation. A three might not get transfer credit but it is a PASS! </p>
<p>Another onesided and poorly researched article by the OP!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>They didn’t have “continuation schools” or whatever they called the schools where students expelled from normal schools for disciplinary problems were sent?</p>
<p>"The population in question does not support a 1.3 million fail rate. "</p>
<p>It is the number of exams, not people.</p>
<p><a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/rtn/9th-annual/9th-annual-ap-report-single-page.pdf[/url]”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/rtn/9th-annual/9th-annual-ap-report-single-page.pdf</a></p>
<p>Bottom of page 19 shows 2.919 million tests administered with about 43.8% fail rate (1s and 2s).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In the latter case, they didn’t have them in that well-off suburban Midwest town and the HS was only one of 2 and the other HS wanted nothing to do with the convicted felon. </p>
<p>I don’t know if NYC had them when I was in middle school…but I heard while volunteering at a parent-teacher meeting some teachers saying such schools were eliminated when some parents were wondering why the same local bullies who were also getting picked up by the local cops for mugging passersby or stealing from local businesses were kept in our middle school rather than “sent off to reform school”. Incidentally, all those bullies ended up serving stretches of time on Rikers or upstate for felonies committed later in HS and beyond.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In NYC in the 80’s if your family had money there were a couple of private schools that seemed always willing to take problem kids…otherwise I think your regular neighborhood HS had to take you. If you’d done something serious enough to merit jail, well yes, there was always Rikers.</p>
<p>Sosomenza, you’re mixing up number of people and number of exams. One student could take multiple exams.</p>
<p>"Advanced Placement classes failing students " … no, opposite. </p>
<p>It’s hilarious to blame Chemistry for “failing” a dumb student. Students fail Advanced Placement classes. Classes are victims, not students. :)</p>
<p>Not to be overly flippant, but isn’t it the point of AP tests that some kids will fail? Unless you are doing all of the weed-out preemptively, by not letting those kids into AP classes or not letting them take the AP tests, a certain number are simply not going to master the material in a way that colleges would like to see them master it. They may not have enough innate intelligence, may not have worked hard, might have had a lousy teacher, or might have taken an “AP” class that was really their first high-school level exposure to the subject. (I have heard of this happening in the sciences: normal biology becomes “AP Biology,” although a student may have had little exposure to the subject.)</p>
<p>Or the high school relabels a frosh/soph level course (possibly the honors version) in geography or world history or something else as an AP course. The high school may hold the students to high school frosh/soph level standards, but the AP test may grade on significantly higher standards (in theory college frosh level; though that may not necessarily be true for some AP tests that colleges rarely accept for subject credit or placement, even in this case, the grading standards are likely to be a lot higher than high school frosh/soph level).</p>
<p>Very interesting topic and posts.</p>
<p>I will agree with some of the points that Consolation made especially about how AP courses in some schools are really the only avenue of rigorous academics available. That is certainly the case at the high school my daughter attended. She never even bothered to take the AP test because they were always offered when she was out doing UIL or auditioning or something but she never took them to get any college credit. For that, we just simply paid the tuition and she took Dual Credit courses in which we KNEW she would get college credit (though not all colleges would necessarily give them much worth as far as applying to a degree - public state colleges generally would, privates would accept them but might not count them as requirements, and Ivies just scoffed.) </p>
<p>But the reason she took them was because they were much harder than the regular courses and would prepare her for college better. Her school didn’t offer any other kinds of college prep versus general, or any other kind of designation. It was either regular, DC, or AP, and the general view was that you were better off getting a C in an AP class than a B or even an A in a general class.</p>
<p>In her school at least, we did find the AP classes to be pretty demanding and she does feel they prepared her well for college. They were actually harder than the DC classes in most cases.</p>
<p>And unfortunately, the general credit courses were the less desirable students who were often discipline problems. I feel so sorry for the teachers who were always stuck with those. There were several required general classes (stupid, and waste of time, that my daughter hated) such as “leadership” and other things that sounded great but were just pointless fluff that the higher kids didn’t really need and the lower kids weren’t going to absorb anyway. My daughter hated them because the kids in there were just going to school because they weren’t old enough to drop out yet and she could have been taking some of the neat courses she never had time for. If there weren’t AP courses (since they don’t “track” the kids any more) she would have been utterly miserable in high school, would not have been able to have the academic rigour she needed for a good college success, and we don’t have a private school that goes through high school in our town as an alternative. And couldn’t afford one even if there were.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Good Point! But the numbers still look unbalanced. 950K students v. 1.3 million failures??? Hopefully a lot of it is due to no shows, by students who can pass but not likely with a 4 or 5.</p>
<p>sosomenza, no, it’s not “unbalanced.” </p>
<p>Texaspg already explained it but I’ll take another whack at it for you. </p>
<p>950,000 students account for 2.919 million tests. Even without using a calculator, that means that students taking APs take on average about 3 tests apiece. Of those 2.919 million tests, there is a 43.8% fail rate. That gets you to 1.3 million failures. That’s not “no shows”; they wouldn’t count. </p>
<p>I’m guessing you didn’t take AP Calculus or AP Statistics :-). With all due respect, this is a pretty simple math / logic problem.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The choice is not between an AP course or nothing. Students need to master algebra, trigonometry and the concept of functions – tested on the SAT Math subject test level 2 – before they study calculus. If they have not, they are better off in an Algebra II or pre-calculus course than in AP Calculus, and the people who are ready for AP Calculus will benefit from not having class time spent on pre-calculus topics. Similar arguments could be made about other AP courses.</p>
<p>Beliavsky, in any human endeavor, there will be people who are “qualified” to study it but who will not do as well as they had hoped. It’s like you envision some world where people magically have it stamped on their forehead that they WILL get a 5 on the AP test before they sign up for the course. Anyway, if everyone got a 4 or 5, you’d probably change the goalposts and claim that the test was too easy and wasn’t adequately distinguishing the stand-out students from the merely good students.</p>
<p>If an AP class is intended to mimic a college class, there should be some students who fail. Not because they are not prepared, but because they have reached the level where it has become difficult. Part of our problem is grade inflation - we are so concerned that everyone should be able to get an A, but what does an A represent? What should a 5 on the AP exams represent, if a 3 is passing? A 3 should be equivalent to a C in a college level course - and if elite colleges choose not to award credit for that C, so be it. Yes, it is passing, but if you’re transferring from a CC to an engineering or other technical school, is the C in Calc I going to prepare you for more advanced classes?</p>
<p>Some of the score distributions can be explained easily - I know of many high schools that offer Calculus as 2 classes. AB taken first as a Junior, and then followed by BC senior year. The students that don’t do well in AB don’t go on to BC, so that knocks out the low scorers in the BC class. Then when they take the BC exam, they have spent 2 years studying the material - they’re taking 2 years to complete a 1 year sequence of classes. This is also the case with many of the non-STEM courses. Yes they are rigorous, but are they completing a full year of college study? In most cases, no. They are taking a full year to complete a 1-semester class. This is not in fact preparing them to the rigor of college level classes which will move twice as fast.</p>
<p>Are they covering that semester’s worth of material? Yes. As such, they should place out of an equivalent college class - if the college they are attending has a course that is equivalent. As others have already said, there seems to have been some creep in terms of the purpose of AP classes. They were originally intended to allow placement, and perhaps to allow gifted students more advanced (though not necessarily more rigorous) classes. They allowed HS students a taste of the level of learning done in college, but not necessarily to prepare them for college any more than a traditional college-prep class would.</p>
<p>It does bother me that so many schools are offering these classes to freshmen and sophomores - it suggests that schools don’t have an appropriate curriculum for their more advanced students. If so many HS Freshmen are really ready for college level classes, then why are they still in high school? I would argue that any student taking a string of 5 AP classes in one year should have completed the requirements to graduate HS, and should be a college student. Those taking 1 or 2 math/science APs, while completing HS english and history makes sense. Those taking 1 or 2 non-STEM APs, while completing HS math and science also makes sense. Those students have not learned all they need in HS yet )particularly given the large percentage of new college students who seem to be unprepared.</p>
<p>I think part of the problem is that we allow these HS students to believe that they have been working at a college level. Some are, but most are not. They are going in with advanced standing, and starting with upper level college courses - having never taken a true college level class, taught at the regular college pace. Is that not a disservice?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is not a choice that high schools give in math. High schools generally have a defined sequence of math courses, with algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, and trigonometry/precalculus in sequence before calculus. So only students who have completed the sequence of prerequisites will be in the calculus course. However, if the high school’s instructional quality in its math courses is poor, the problem might only be revealed when students in calculus do poorly on the AP test, or on college math placement tests they take when registering for math courses at the colleges they eventually go to.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is a disservice to the best students in math. Students who are two years ahead of the normal sequence (taking calculus as high school juniors) should be the top students in math who should be capable of handling college pace math (i.e. all of calculus BC in one year). When I was in high school, such students were uncommon, and tended to find calculus BC an easy A in the course and an easy 5 on the AP test (most calculus students were seniors who were one year ahead, and the high school only offered BC at the time, though it added AB later).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The issue is that many of the newer AP courses/tests are “AP lite” courses/tests, which, as you say, are not truly college-pace courses (e.g. taking a year to cover what is normally a one semester college course), or not even covering material at a level that colleges tend to give subject credit for (e.g. AP human geography).</p>
<p>Indeed, they are examples of AP “mission creep” away from its original purpose of allowing the most advanced students to avoid repeating what they know in college and toward defining a college prep high school curriculum. AP human geography may be a good high school frosh/soph social studies course, but to say that it is college level work is misleading.</p>