<p>ucb, poor and minority students do not necessarily “drag everyone down.” I know a school system that set up a policy where kids have to be ‘recommended’ to go into honors, AP or IB. When the white and Asian kids were being overwhelmingly recommended and the minority kids were not, an advocacy group successfully petitioned for parents to be able to recommend their child. Sounds great, right? Well, the immediate effect I saw was that the parent of every white and Asian kid-- including kids who had just come out of English as a second language or who had just landed in the country-- recommended their kid for advanced classes. Minority parents, especially Hispanic parents, rarely did. My kid had a Hispanic friend whose parents made very good $ and had college educations and good positions. This boy was gifted, had straight As but his parents only allowed him to be in honors/ AP/IB in one subject-- math. He took BC Calc in 9th or 10th grade and earned a 5 on the exam. He had wonderful test scores-- but was subject to the lowest level class because mom and dad thought anything else would be “too stressful.” So he was put in the lowest classes with easy curriculum, the newest teachers and the problem behavior kids (who, by the way, were often not minority kids). He got beat up repeatedly.</p>
<p>APs… Well, I’m rather fond of AP Eng lit and AP Span lit and my kids thought AP Chem was a good class. I would agree that there is great variety among the classes and they do emphasis breadth rather than depth. However, I think they are a short-cut for designating rigor because we do not have a national curriculum and admissions counselors don’t know every single class at every school. I think classes like AP Eng Lit are good for preparing students for college writing. Is it the only way to do it? Absolutely not-- but I think it’s a valid way to do it, with or without the course credit. I am also one of those people who think that even kids who earned a 2 on the exam may have been better off taking the class. It’s possible to get a lot from the class and not do well on the exam-- perhaps because the teacher didn’t teach to the test as much as he or she could have or perhaps because the student wasn’t able to master all the concepts but still learned quite a bit.</p>
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<p>I did not say that. What I said was that eliminating tracking solves the problem of the use of non-relevant criteria (like socioeconomic status and ethnicity) in tracking decisions (that bclintonk described), but school districts may respond by dragging everyone down to the low achiever level instead of bringing everyone up to the high achiever level (regardless of the actual distribution of students’ achievement in comparison to socioeconomic status and ethnicity – and if there is such a correlation between low achievement and these factors, then there is likely a problem somewhere else in the school system, probably in the lower grade levels).</p>
<p>Regarding the parents who put their prodigy kid in the lowest track classes (other than math)… they should know better (regardless of ethnicity).</p>
<p>I have known students who took 10+ AP courses but only took 1-2 AP exams. Why? Because the colleges to which they had been admitted wouldn’t accept AP credit for more than 1-2 courses. However, to be admitted to those colleges, they had to have top-of-the-class GPAs – only achievable by taking so many APs in a weighted GPA system.</p>
<p>As long as some colleges tell students that they want only the top students who have taken the most rigorous course load available, students will flock to APs. At our school, most APs are quite rigorous, particularly English III and IV, Calculus AB/BC, U.S. Government, Art History, Biology, and Chemistry. We are on the semester schedule, so the intensity is more like that in college. Moreover, the teachers in those courses are very good and we regularly have high AP exam scores and students who have successful transitions to college courses.</p>
<p>Shrug. Here, AP = honors. I don’t see any broad differences. My kids didn’t join any arms race - they took AP in subject matters that interested them and regular in areas that didn’t. They liked the classes well enough - indeed, it stimulated areas for them. I don’t get any controversy.</p>
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<p>My daughter got 30 credits at Cornell on the basis of AP scores.</p>
<p>Of course, on this board, many people don’t consider Cornell to be among the better colleges.</p>
<p>Agree with chaosakita. Just another thread about/by some cranky guy grousing about something. The benefit of the AP approach is some consistency with respect to the curriculum taught to the students, and the core preparation it provides for post secondary school. I am surprised by Marsian’s post, however. At my s’s school they would never allow a student to skip the AP exam. Signing up for the course includes a commitment to take the exam.</p>
<p>^^Does your school pay for the exam? Ours doesn’t. My kid took lots of AP classes for which she didn’t take the exam, since they were expensive and the colleges at which she was looking would not give credit for them in any event.</p>
<p>Our school’s solution to bclintonk’s point is horrific: kids who want to get Honors or AP credit in English classes have to do extra work for that designation, so they get the disadvantage of being in class with kids who can barely read and get punished with extra work to get the credits they need to get into college. The idea is that any kid, regardless of background, can self-select rather than be tracked into higher level classes. The reality is that only the kids whose parents have enough leverage over them to make them do the extra work choose that path, and classroom discussions operate at the lowest possible level.</p>
<p>jym626–add to that a cranky old guy that constantly laments how awful the schools are in his area…</p>
<p>An AP course is as good as the teacher teaching the class. Someone posted that AP World is a joke at their school, at our school it is one of the hardest AP classes kids take. The teacher is a brutal grader and expects a LOT from the students. Most kids have several hours of homework a night for that class and it clips along at a very fast pace. The result, however, is 85+% of the kids getting a 5 on the AP exam too. The textbook is the same textbook used at our flagship and the kids cover the same material as 2 semesters of college world history. AP Psych, while interesting, just isn’t that challenging of a class at our high school, but it is still beneficial for kids to take.</p>
<p>Thats not how it worked in my kids’ school, Sop14. No, the school did not pay for the exam. The family paid. So yes, there is a cost. Maybe there is a scholarship option. Dunno. But in my kids’s school they could not self select to take an AP class. They had to get permission to take it. There are more students than spots, so they have to get permission to take the class. And IMO, the school “allows” those students to take the class who they believe will score well on the exam and will make the school’s stats look good on their website.</p>
<p>This is a private school</p>
<p>Right–private schools can do that. Publics can’t force families to pay $85/per to see their kids fail the exam because, whoops, the class they say has an AP designation isn’t actually remotely related to the exam. (To be fair, the AP BC Calc teacher actually follows the syllabus and her students do quite well, but then she forces the kids who won’t score well to switch into AB Calc.)</p>
<p>At our school if you score a 4 or higher, they reimburse part of the fee for the test. Kids need “permission” to sign up for AP classes but that permission is pretty lax. At the end of the year the teachers meet 1 on 1 with each student for placement next year but the kids do have the final say in what classes they take. DD’s teacher decided she should not take AP Calc BC, why, who knows. She had a A in pre-calc last year. She, so far this year, has the highest percent in BC Calc out of all the sections. At conferences her teacher commented on that and was really surprised when her previous year’s teacher thought she shouldn’t take the class :D. For her, her grade in that class is meaningless. She will have been accepted and decided upon a school before the first marking period is complete and she just needs a 3 on the test or better to not have to take calc in college. Last year, they had one 3, the rest were 4 or 5 so odds are in her favor :D.</p>
<p>Well back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I took AP classes, I remember distinctly taking AP Calc with no intention of taking the exam (this was a public school). However, they insisted I take the exam. Gave me no choice. It was like that nightmare we all have that we discover we have to take a test we didn’t study for. It wasn’t pretty.</p>
<p>Ouch. My public high school’s only AP offering, also back in the Mesozoic era, was a single trimester of “AP English,” which consisted of learning to write the five-paragraph essay. I don’t think we knew AP Exams existed.</p>
<p>Oh, and get this. In the middle of the AP French exam (which I was prepared for, unlike that little surprise “you have to take it” AP exam) the fire alarm went off in the middle of the tape of the passage we had to listen to. They made us all leave the building, wait outside for the proscribed time, and go back in. They continued the tape, but would not restart it (followed the “AP rules” so they claimed) and of course none of us remembered the first half of the passage. That was BS.</p>
<p>^^Wow. Just wow.</p>
<p>Wrt AP calc -</p>
<p>Good idea for students who expect to take calc 3 in college to take BC calc at our high school, since the class goes into most of what is taught in calc 3 even at most selective schools, and at least at the high school level the teacher speaks fluent English and personally helps struggling students before and after school, corrects student work by hand, and takes pride in how many students do very well on the AP exam even if they have had difficulty with the material. (The AB class covers most of calc 2, enough to do the trick for aspiring pre-meds and biology majors.)</p>
<p>Not sure how much AP calc would have helped with the calculus I took in college, though, which was proof based and used Apostol as a text. Many of us came straight from honors pre-calc, with a few having had AP calc in high school, yet had perfect or near perfect math SAT’s.</p>
<p>jym – There is a stated “expectation” that AP students in our (public) school take the AP exam, but no one enforces that. The reality is that by the end of the senior year, AP students know where they’re going to go to college, and they don’t take AP exams that won’t count toward credit at those schools. Doing so would be irrational and a waste of money. It doesn’t happen much, though, because most colleges around here take as much AP credit as the student has – especially public universities, which are under political pressure to make sure students stay no more than four years, even less if possible.</p>
<p>I am going to ask someone whose kids attend the local public HS if they are required to take the AP exam as a commitment when they register for the class. I do know that while they can self select to take any AP class, they do so with the understanding that they will not be allowed to drop it if they are struggling. So that is their attempt at limiting the self-selection.</p>
<p>In my district’s high school one can only take an AP class if recommended by a teacher and kids are required to take the AP exam.</p>