But it is well worth remembering the school context matters as well - the do not expect a student to have taken 10+ honors classes if either their school doesn’t offer that many or their school has policies in place which limit how many a student can take. Our high school has a solid acceptance rate at UCB and this year at both UCB and UCLA. We also have policies that limit the number of AP classes students are allowed to take (3 max and only junior and senior year). Most students have definitely not taken 10+ honors classes. Average is maybe 4 or 5 AP classes, maybe one honors class (our school doesn’t offer many honors classes - mostly just AP and regular, with an honors English class and an honors math class thrown in, but not for all levels).
Since our acceptance rate has historically been well above state average, this is clearly not held against students. So perhaps it is really up to the schools to end the AP rat race by creating and enforcing policies that prohibit students from taking 6 or 7 AP classes per year. Of course, that is easier said than done as the schools would then have to ensure that their regular-level classes offer enough challenge for high achievement students (although such students can also take DE classes if they want more challenge). Not all have the capacity to do so. But I think that would be a good first step toward ending what I personally believe is complete madness in many cases.
Exact same policy at our school. We do great with the UCs with this policy (including UCB and UCLA), and this year have students attending Princeton, Brown, Duke, and other highly selective schools, so AOs do take this into consideration and don’t penalize students. So again perhaps reform begins in the schools.
This is absolutely true. Based on direct feedback from my kids. Some of the “regular” classes at the non-magnet portion of our school are so ridiculous the other way, that if you show up and complete basic worksheets that they get done in half a class period and show up, you get an A. So if the choice is between that and magnet electives and additional APs beyond what’s required, these kids will always pick AP just because they don’t want to be bored to tears.
Which is a whole other story in itself about the education system - can you blame the kids who spend their days in the bathroom smoking if they don’t have opportunity to be engaged at all? That’s what happens when everything gets dumbed down. Kids who want to be challenged go to extremes. So I agree - it’s not always about competition. For myself at least, our family has not pushed them into magnets - it was all them - they felt like they hadn’t been challenged and wanted to explore their limits. Schools need to do a better job teaching across different capabilities so everyone can explore their limits without burnout. Not easy, but clearly many many schools are failing in that aspect.
Rigor means thoroughness. A more rigorous course doesn’t have to be “higher level”, or have greater workload. A thorough geometry course which emphasizes derivation and careful reasoning (still taught at some high schools) is much more rigorous than AP Calculus BC, for example.
Those high schools also need to have enough resources to develop their own courses and curricula, rather than relying what already exists (whether AP or something else like IB).
They also may be making that choice because it helps differentiate them from common high schools that offer AP (or IB) courses. AP courses and exams started as a collaboration between elite high schools and elite colleges. Now that they are the norm in many non-elite high schools, those high schools that want to market themselves as elite may be moving away from them as a means of distinguishing themselves in the market of high schools.
Or they believe that to get their counselor to mark “most demanding schedule” and “one of the top few academic achievers”, they need to take as many AP (or whatever the most rigorous course options are at the high school) courses as possible in order to stand out from (or not be lesser than) the other students competing for these marks.
I actually disagree. Because a lot of schools don’t have any good options in between boring kids to death with lack of challenge and AP classes. Kids shouldn’t be penalized for actually wanting to be engaged. I don’t think the answer is to grade them more harshly but figure out how to make the other classes equally engaging/challenging (and weighting accordingly) for those who can handle more challenge - it doesn’t help when depending on the school, half the kids in the “regular” non-AP/honors classes don’t want to be there - that’s distracting. Offer more engaging options other than AP. While they’re at it, they need to find ways to make l the “regular” classes engaging and challenging for everyone as well, not just high performers.
That is very interesting and beautifully concise. I am not sure that I agree with your definition, but I like it. My guess is that it is not a helpful definition for the guidance counselors checking boxes, but as I said upthread, I wasn’t necessarily looking for an answer about what guidance counselors do in practice. I was more interested in personal definitions.
Still, I have no idea whether my rising senior’s school does for that box. I should email her college advisor and find out. Unfortunately, it is probably too late to be finding out the answer now given she has already selected her courses for next year. But maybe it would be useful to know the school’s policy on rigor in advance for the next kid.
Again though, depending on track, rigor has to also mean higher level. Unless they work backwards and remove separate tracks at elementary and middle school levels. Kids at magnet/IB track have taken geometry and pre-algebra by 8th grade. So they are starting with Algebra 2 and beyond. Kids who hadn’t taken geometry and pre-algebra are starting at those classes in HS. They are starting at different points so it’s impossible not to give the fast/track kids higher level content to keep them interested.
If schools want to accomplish the stated purpose of an AP course to be the equivalent of the college course, they should calibrate their grading over time to their students AP test results, so that they roughly give out as many A’s as their kids tend to earn 5’s, and B’s to 4’s, etc. If they give out easy A’s to inspire curiosity and more than half their kids in their courses don’t receive a passing 3 on the test, that may be a worth course but it’s not accomplishing the purpose of the AP course.
As long as there are helicopter parents, tiger parents, peer pressure, etc…students will continue to push for this. I don’t think it’s primarily high schools that do the pushing. In fact, some high schools do restrict the numbers of APs students can take.
At least the magnet students in our AP classes tend to get higher percentage of 4s and 5s on most AP exams than nationally.
Back in my day, a 3 or 4 on AP exam got you credit for college. Now you need a 4 or 5. I’m maybe ok with correlating the AP score with grade but not according to some statistical curve - if it can be correlated to that student’s AP score that might be different, but kind of hard to do when AP scores come out in July and the class is completed earlier. But a kid who gets a 5 on AP exam by that same token should get an A?
I have learned a lot in this thread about how a variety of high schools work. My kids are homeschooled and I have worked hard to find courses for them that are challenging and have the kind of course expectations and policies they will encounter in college. (So we have looked for classes that use rigorous—in the dictionary definition of the term—textbooks. We have tried to find classes that have in-depth, analytical homework assignments, rather than simply busywork or parroting back what has been read or taught. And we have looked for classes that have strict expectations about submitting work on time and meeting the rubric/teacher guidelines.)
For my kids, the majority of their “regular” classes have been challenging, and interesting, deep. The AP classes they have taken I have found to be less well taught, more formulaic, and more stressful with less intellectual engagement. That informs my negative feelings about AP classes, along with the additional costs associated; AP classes tend to cost about $200 more for the actual class plus the additional almost $100 for the test.
After reading other peoples experiences, I can definitely understand the desire to take so many AP classes if your alternatives are “regular“ classes where the majority of the students don’t care, and the teachers are giving dull busywork.
Right, once an AP-dominated system is in place at a HS, ambitious students at that HS will want to work within it to be competitive for the most selective colleges.
But I was taking a step back and asking why a HS would put into place an AP-dominated system like that to begin with. Particularly when we know there are HSs (like ours, in fact) that do a good job with college placement without such a system.
And at a high level, I suspect the answer is a lot of HSs think that in order for their students to compete with ours, in practice they need an AP-dominated system.
After college freshman fall, my son went back to the HS and strongly advocated not removing the APs. He said it is a breeze to place out of classes at college than having to test out. He had an open freshman year (barring a writing seminar) as a result instead of a full set of requirements.
Just a suggestion, but the Glossary of Education Reform has an entry on rigor that I personally like, and I think likely captures a lot of the nuances and issues that are in the minds of admissions officers. There is a specific reference to APs and how they may not exactly match a given sense of rigor.
This forum is full of people disproportionately in well above average schools. Those schools both have better resources and reputations than the average school. For an average public resource constrained school, the AP offers a ready-made, tested and calibrated curriculum and lesson plans with many available books and resources ready-made to test against it. And it had brand credibility that a school without a good reputation isn’t going to automatically have even if they did endeavor to build their own challenging course from scratch. Plus is comes with a major carrot for students – college credit at most schools, particularly at the state colleges most people attend.
You really can’t separate this discussion from resources at the vast majority of schools - both financial and frankly TEACHERS. Our school has a full IB diploma - so those kids are looking at 4-5 AP equivalent classes in 11-12 grade. It also offered a plethora of AP courses. It’s a great challenging school, but it is definitely one of the ones facing an absolute desert of options that aren’t AP or IB. My son wasn’t really interested in AP Lit, so signed up for English 12. He lasted a day and went into his counselor’s office and changed it.
I don’t expect agreement. The problem you identified is really a problem with secondary education in general in much of the country. Many high school courses lack rigor and more AP courses aren’t really the solutions. The original intention of AP was to give highly advanced students an option to take some standardized higher-level courses that might give them higher standing when they enter college, rather than as replacements for other high school courses, and in the process, making those other courses less rigorous anbd less challenging.
