Son just received a 5 on APUSH after receiving a C and a B in the class. I have heard of some schools automatically bumping the grade up one level, and in some cases awarding the student an A in the class. It would seem that the teacher would have an argument that students should WORK for the grade attained. By contrast, premliminary reports suggest as few as 9% of the APUSH test takers garnered the coveted score of 5 this year. I am also a bit concerned that AdComs (my son begins applying to college in a few weeks) are going to wonder if S is lazy with classroom work. Interestingly, my daughter got a C/A in the class 6 years ago and received just a 3 on the exam. I have heard stories from other parents about this teacher’s capable methods not yielding to requests for grades to be changed. Finally, at least three other high schools in the same conference have an automatic policy that AP scores of 5 are always rewarded with A’s on the grade transcript. I have a good relationship with the school principal and expect that he will consider a review of the school policy in the future.
No it would not change the grade. Nor would our school ever consider allowing it to change the grade. The test and classroom grades are based on different things. While both evaluate knowledge, the class also evaluates things like participation, timeliness of turning in work, creativity and presentation on class projects, and the fulfilling of requirements on those projects and other assignments. Changing the class grade would be totally Inappropriate at our school.
It doesn’t happen here. In theory, the goal of an AP class is to greater your understanding of the subject (obviously that’s not generally true) not to get you a 5 on the AP exam. They are separate things and one should not affect the other.
The grade that your son earned in the class is based on the work and the effort that he put forth in that class. There should be no expectation that his grade is going to be changed because he did well on the exam. The fact that your son happened to do well on the exam does not negate what he did in the classroom day in/day out over the past 180 days of the school year.
Would you have the same expectation if he received an A in the class and a 2/3 on the exam?
Thanks for all your remarks. The AP exam is an objective measure and classroom grades are inherently subjective. I should add that exam graders (obviously) scored my son high on essays based upon benchmarks agreed by panels who design the test, while the classroom teacher at times graded my son lower on many of his essays throughout the school year. The important obvious fact is that my son knows the material. Moreover, he will receive 6 semester hours college credit from many institutions where he will be applying later this year.
I am still curious to hear anyone with schools with policies that reward students in the classroom after the school year for top notch performance on the AP exam? 
The only time I have seen a teacher change a grade is when the student actually tried in a class and got a D and then passed the state test for that subject. In those situations some teachers will change the grade to a C. The reason this was ever considered is because some parents made the case that if the student understood the material well enough to pass the state test, then they should receive a passing grade in the class. The kid passing the state test made the principal look good with a higher test score, realistically, principals and school districts don’t give a damn about AP scores (they only care about the number of kids taking the test) or SAT/ACT scores. You can go and talk to the principal and the teacher, at the same time, and see if they would be willing to change it, you have nothing to lose.
It counted as the final test grade for my kids. I don’t recall the rubric so don’t recall what percent it counted for but I do recall if you had a B going into the test and you got a 5 you would end up with an A- in the class. AP tests are required to be taken if you take an AP class my kids’ high school.
Our kids’ grades are finalized in early June and ranks are recomputed. Changing grades after AP scores came out in mid-July would delay transcripts for rising seniors, many of whom begin applying for state schools on August 1. I don’t see this policy changing for us.
I guess I am a little baffled why you are directly involved at all and will talk to the school principal. At our public HS it is made clear that as a general rule it is the student’s responsibility to communicate with the teachers and administration about concerns with grades and other such matters. It is part of teaching them how to become responsible, self sufficient adults ready for college and/or the workplace. Parents helicoptering and getting directly involved to try to fix their kid’s less than stellar grades does not achieve this goal. Certainly no college Prof will tolerate this and one is trying to get one’s child ready for college. And certainly no employer will tolerate an employee’s parent contacting them and asking for a raise or higher performance rating.
At my s’s school AP scores of 4 or 5 may result in some points boost to the final grade depending on the class - ie if it counts as their class final exam. My s received a 4 on the APUSH exam and was entitled to some extra points. The teacher forgot to do it. It took my s 6 months but he finally went to speak to her about it. Though he was way late in asking, she graciously gave him the extra points and adjusted his grade from the prior year.
To quote my s’s pre-k teacher “you get what you get and don’t throw a fit.”
Sorry dad. My son was like that too. He did not do nearly as well in class as he did in exams. Not that he did poorly in class. Now that he has taken Honors English, he wants the College Board to retroactively award him a 5. LOL Some of it is laziness. Some of it is an unwillingness to change. I find that smart kids tend toward this attribute a great deal. The teacher often asks for things to be a certain way. If kids don’t deliver, they don’t get the grade. That is a good real-life lesson. It does not matter how smart you are, you need to follow company policy, the law, etc.
The reality is that the AP writing tests have a huge amount of subjectivity as well. One of our ‘favorite’ teachers is one who reads the essays and grades them for the college board. There is not a panel, each test is graded by one person. They use a common rubric, but that does little to alter the inherent subjectivity.
The results in this case do tell the college something. What, remains to be seen. Your son does not put forth the effort in that particular class in line with his ability to grasp the knowledge. It may be reflective of the teacher. However if that were the case, they could see the composite scores from your school and see if they were similarly skewed.
Usually my younger son’s scores tracked his test scores pretty well, however his sophomore year AP World teacher was a bit of a jerk, and after he made up enough facts my son lost patience with him. He got a B in the class and the teacher actually predicted a grade of a 1 or 2, in fact he ended up with a 5 on the exam one of only a couple of kids in the class to ace the test. I think his class grade did reflects some biased grading on the high school teachers part, and I did kind of wish that we had that policy of bumping up grades for kids who did well on the AP exam, but I can see that it would be a nightmare for the high school.
Ultimately he got A’s on all his other history courses and 5’s on all his other history APs, and a very positive recommendation from his APUSH teacher, and I think colleges got the message that laziness was probably not the issue. He certainly did fine with college acceptences.
Our school does count Regent’s test scores as a fifth marking period, but Regents scores come back before school is out, not months later.
More than 1/2 of ap test points come from writing- graded by humans- which is inherently subjective. I have graded ap tests in past years - and there is training, and a “table head” for checking scores etc- but still- it is not objective. That said, and regarding the OP- I would not feel the grade should be changed.
The AP score has absolutely no impact on the course grade in our HS.
I know of one student (in Idaho) who after he got a 5 on the AP Calc test, the teacher retroactively upped his HS class grade (without being asked by the student) which changed his GPA enough to get him some extra merit money from his college. This is the only case I know where the AP score changed the HS class score.
Think of it this way.
Let’s say that there’s a senior who gets a poor but passing grade in an AP course. And that he needs that course to graduate from high school. He graduates in May.
Then the AP scores come out in July, and he gets a 1. Would the school retroactively un-graduate him?
Well, if a school can’t lower a student’s grade retroactively in response to an AP test, should they be able to raise it in response to an AP test?
“The important obvious fact is that my son knows the material.” There is so much more in the classroom than just knowing the material. There are a lot of smart people who make lousy employees.
My youngest just got a 5 on the APUSH exam and I don’t know what grade she got in class. I am thinking an A, but maybe not (I don’t track my kids grades and that has always worked well in my house). I don’t see the two marks related to each other except for being the same subject, but would never expect it to influence final grade in class.
This is not the policy in our school system and I had never heard of it before finding this site. I think it’s a poor idea because it conflates two separate measures, especially in cases where the AP class activities aren’t that well aligned with the material tested on the exam. And also for the reasons cited by other posters.
I think it would be an extremely bad idea for you to try to intervene and convince the school that they should make an exception to school policy to increase your son’s grade. Why would they do this? Why do you think it would be fair to the other students? It’s one thing if there is a policy in place which applies to everyone, but you can’t pick and choose how to be graded. Also, your school’s athletic conference has nothing to do with grading policy at your school and isn’t in any way a justification for raising your son’s grade.
I come at this from the other side of the fence. DS took APUSH during sophomore year. He also had a bad concussion that year, which the APUSH teacher didn’t fully appreciate. He received a B in the course. To send the teacher a message, but most importantly so that future AOs would know that his grade was inappropriate, he took the AP test (5) and also the SAT Subject Test (780).
He didn’t expect his grade to change, and it didn’t.
ETA: it would not have occurred to me to get involved in this, other than to high five DS for finding the right way to express to the teacher how he felt about the B. Fwiw, his GPA did not keep him out of his first choice school.
In my too-many years on cc, I have heard of a few schools that use the AP scores as finals so they go back and reconfigure the final grades. Sounds like a pain to me, and I get the impression that these must be small schools.
As my sons’ school, many kids who regularly get Bs or Cs in BC Cal get a 5 on the test. The teacher is just a taskmaster, and it’s difficult to get an A in class despite learning the material. The kids see it as a challenge.
While I don’t think it makes sense to have a policy of changing grades based on AP scores I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with parents getting involved in discussions of all school policy issues ( vs demanding a change just for their child) . If we really think that parents should be uninvolved in the academic lives of their minor children because they should be uninvolved in college then perhaps we shouldn’t require them to provide excuses for absences due to illness or have them be able to set curfews when none will apply in college.