<p>I wonder, at this point, why in the world we keep some kids in high school for 4 years. When we have kids who are taking AP classes starting their freshman year, not presenting any discipline problems and exhibit a high level of maturity in general, why not start these kids in a junior college/college prep atmosphere/trade school.</p>
<p>Ideally kids could graduate from college earlier, enter the job market earlier, etc. Just seems like a waste of time, stagnating in a public high school for 4 years taking classes meant to be a college equivalency.</p>
<p>If this is what we’ve become, we should consider revamping the whole system.</p>
<p>I know by the senior year of all 3 of my kids, they were all thinking, “Why am I here? Why am I not in college right now? Oh yea…I want my band letter jacket (or some other similar)”</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Competency tests are used by colleges, and often for foreign languages.</p></li>
<li><p>Unfortunately, the real issues debated here have little to do with … the college requirements. The entire AP “story” is about sending signals to colleges in the context of admissions; something the Advanced Placement tests were never designed to do!</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Thats exactly the point, xig. If the hope/goal is to unhook the AP exams from the college apps process and put it back into the role of being able to demonstrate the ability to do college level work, then the competency exams (like the language proficiency ones you mention) can do the trick. There is nothing wrong with offering the advanced/enrichment courses in HS, but if we unhook them from the end of course exam, then the control/ $$$ profit to CollegeBoard will dissipate.</p>
<p>Because kids like this don’t want to be in a junior college/trade school atmosphere?</p>
<p>The kids I know who fit this description want to go to “real” colleges (where “real” is defined as “my flagship state university or a college that’s more selective/prestigious”). And they want to go there for four years and have a full-fledged college experience, not enter halfway through as community college transfers.</p>
<p>What about students who are advanced in one or two subjects, but not in others? For example, a high school senior may be ready for college level math, but not college level English, or vice-versa. This can be an issue at any transition point (high school -> college, middle school -> high school) where students are not evenly advanced in all subjects. Is it better for the student to stay in the lower level school, and have the lower level school offer advanced courses, or for the student to move to the upper level school, and have the upper level school offer remedial courses?</p>
<p>Isn’t it true that even at the most selective colleges, a more typical number of AP tests taken is three to five? In other words, not a year ahead in all subjects, but just advanced (perhaps only by a semester) in a few subjects?</p>
<p>My experience is that there are about 10% of the students at my daughter’s school that are taking all AP or Dual classes for all academics by junior year. That was certainly the case for my kids.</p>
<p>Yes, there are many more who are similar to what you describe. But I would say a large proportion of CC parents’ kids are in that top 10% level.</p>
<p>I wasn’t suggesting that ALL kids should go on to trade school or college. I said “some kids”.</p>
<p>Some kids I hear about on this board are taking AP classes their freshman year!</p>
<p>ucb, Sorry to go back so many posts but I haven’t been on much. You said that parents who put their prodigy kid in the lowest track classes should know better regardless of ethnicity. The fact is they don’t. The school system in Latin America is quite different and, even minority parents raised in the US may not have been educated in a system that encourages pushing quite as much as we do now. (These parents thought that regular classes were ‘good enough’ since they guaranteed a high school diploma and they planned for their child to go to ‘just a state school’-- albeit a top engineering program at a pretty good flagship. They thought that following the ‘regular’ path would put him on track for the ‘regular’ college which was their flagship.) You said that if there’s a correlation between low achievement and ethnicity and socioeconomic factor, it is probably due to problems in the lower grades. I will tell you that, in my school system, the problem becomes much larger as soon as tracking begins-- middle school and then high school. The minority kids are not tracked into the same classes so they have worse teachers and less challenging curriculum. I do not oppose tracking but I do think that minority kids who show potential should be actively encouraged to seek challenge and that may mean having guidance counselors and schools make an extra effort to reach out to minority parents.</p>
<p>D1 was one of those kids, along with every other kid in her entry-by-test magnet. She and her classmates had absolutely no interest in leaving high school early. We’ve known other kids who’ve decided otherwise. In our area, I’ve seen academically able 9th graders enrolled in an early college program where students exit in four years with a bachelors degree; students skip 12th grade and start at four-year colleges a year early because they’re bored with the school curriculum; students skip 12th grade and start at local CCs, then use AP and CC credits a year later to apply to UCs as transfers while their former classmates are applying to those same UCs as freshmen. </p>
<p>Easier here, because it’s a large urban area. Harder in areas where there aren’t as many choices or the possibility of dual enrollment, though some may choose the Simon’s Rock program at Bard.</p>
<p>DD took full IB and AP courses and I feel that they did exactly what they were intended. It gave her a solid foundation for college. It also let her take advance classes sooner. Had these options not existed she would have been less challenged. Honors courses are not better than regular courses we took back in the day, atleast in her high school. I see nothing wrong with taking more than a semester to teach these subjects. After all, these are high school kids that may or may not get college credit for the subject. Don’t forget that many of the subjects do not have a high pass rate. For some subjects only 20% to 30% of the kids get 4’s or 5’s on them. That leaves 60% to 70% of the kids getting nothing for their work, except for high school credit.</p>
<p>We had a lot of home-schooled kids enter our high school in what would normally be their junior year, after loading up at the CC in the summer, take all AP and dual junior year and dual in the summer, get their class rank (usually VERY high) and graduate halfway through their senior year.</p>
<p>My kids were too much into the social aspect of high school to want to graduate early - but had they been homeschooled from the beginning, I think this would have been a better option.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus - okay. Understood. I still stand by what I said. Some kids would be better off going on to trade school or college starting their junior year of HS.</p>
<p>jym26 - In response to your “Do the AP Kids Have To take Tests” Q - </p>
<p>No, in our district in IL - the biggest in the state. Families pay, not the school, and kids are NOT required to take them. Our Principal is on a mission to increase the number of kids taking AP - because they are more difficult courses - not because of scores. Although it is clearly to his benefit if the kids score highter on the IL Prairie State Achievement Exams.</p>
<p>I have read all the posts on here, and though I can see some problems with the AP program, calling it a scam seems hyperbolic to me.</p>
<p>We have a program here in Minnesota called PSEO (post-secondary educational options) in which the state pays for qualifying HS juniors and seniors to take actual college classes at actual colleges (not “college in the high schools, which essentially tries to convert college classes into HS classes). Some kids use it to take community college classes; here in the Twin Cities, many kids use it to take classes at our public flagship. You can even take classes at a private college, if they accept you. My D1 applied and was accepted to do PSEO at Macalester, an excellent LAC, but she ended up turning it down because Mac allows PSEO students to take only one class at a time. She ended up at the U which allows PSEO kids to take up to a full load as long as they’re doing well at it. Both my daughters report their U classes have been more challenging than the IB classes at our local public high school (which doesn’t offer AP), not so much because the material is necessarily harder but because the pace is faster–as a rule of thumb, a college class will cover in a semester roughly what an advanced HS class will cover in a year–and there’s more depth to the college classes. Also, in a college class you aren’t spoon-fed on a daily basis the way you are in a HS class; you’re expected to do more on your own, outside of class and on your own pace, which means the self-motivation, study skills, and time management issues are different. More like college, you might say. I’m a big believer in the idea that the best way to prepare yourself for college classes is to take actual college classes, not souped-up HS classes masquerading as college classes, which they’re not.</p>
<p>The University of Minnesota likes the PSEO program because it gets many of the highest-achieving HS students in the Twin Cities metro area in the door and taking classes and becoming part of the university community; many decide they like it, some pile up enough credits that they decide the easiest trajectory is to just finish their undergraduate education there, sometimes in as little as 3 or even 2 years (which also improves the university’s graduation rate). PSEO students like it because at a minimum it hugely enriches their HS education, and in many cases substitutes for a large chunk of it, accelerating them into actual college classes where they can go as far and as fast as their capabilities and motivation will take them. Parents like it, in some cases because it reduces the cost of their kids’ education (especially if it shaves semesters or years off), in other cases because it opens up rich new educational opportunities for their kids.
D1 s now a junior at a top LAC. She is very clear that her classes at her LAC are much more rigorous and demanding than the classes she took at the U; she estimates the workload is on average roughly twice as great per class, and the quality of work that is expected is also much higher. She also feels very fortunate, however, to have had the opportunity to take two years of actual college classes before entering college as a freshman. She feels her college study skills and time management skills as a first-semester freshman were miles ahead of many of the other freshmen she knew, many of whom came from fancy private day schools or high-end suburban public schools with tons of APs under their belts. Bottom line, what’s most like a college class is an actual college class; and that better prepares you for college than a HS AP class.</p>
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<p>The Minnesota PSEO model is a perfect solution to that, as well. We know a kid who is a true math wizard; he did PSEO at the University of Minnesota for his HS junior and senior years, and mostly took graduate-level math classes, and this in a leading math department (US News ranks it #18). No HS AP class was advanced enough for him. He later enrolled at the U as a freshman, but with a top of math credits under his belt, and will probably finish his undergrad in 2 or 3 years and go on to an elite graduate school. So he’s essentially using Minnesota’s graduate-level math program as his HS and undergrad math curriculum, then moving on to (probably) one of the handful of graduate math programs that are better. But he wasn’t as advanced on the humanities/social sciences side so he could do his regular HS-level stuff in those areas.</p>
<p>As xiggi suggested upthread, the mistake is to think AP is the only or best option. For this kid, AP clearly would have been an inferior solution.</p>
<p>bclintonk, that’s a wonderful option y’all have. Wins all around for the students, for the parents, for the schools taking part. How do students qualify?</p>
<p>D2’s high school doesn’t offer AP, but suggests that students take a CC course during senior year. With California’s budget cuts, this is no longer easy or straightforward to manage. We’re looking into other, pricier alternatives.</p>
<p>Programs like this are great for students who can take advantage of them, but they are not an option for most of high schools and most students. To take part in such a program, the school has to be located near a major university, and most students in such high schools still cannot easily participate because they don’t have a parent/chauffeur or a car to drive them back and forth to classes between the university and high school.</p>
<p>If a major problem with AP is that it reinforces segregation by race and socioeconomic status, programs like PSEO are many times worse.</p>
<p>So many of the approaches suggested here seem to involve denying a top student the opportunity to enter college as a freshman at 18 and go through four years of college in the normal manner.</p>
<p>This seems like punishment to me. </p>
<p>Why shouldn’t top students have a chance at the normal college experience, just like their slightly less talented peers?</p>
<p>Marian,
I don’t think of MInnesota’s PSEO program as any kind of “punishment.” D1 had 51 college credits by the time she graduated HS, but we treated these as HS classes. She entered her LAC as a freshman, and will take 4 years to graduate, taking a full load every semester. Her LAC only allows the equivalent of 2 courses to count toward graduation requirements anyway, but we’re cool with that. We’re big believers in a full 4-year undergraduate experience. But we also understand that other families with scarcer financial resources will make other choices and want their kids to go straight through at the U or get as many transfer credits as possible at another institution, and that’s OK, too. If it helps that family afford a college education they might otherwise not have been able to afford, more power to 'em. PSEO creates options, it doesn’t limit them.</p>
<p>As for the point that PSEO is more segregating than AP, I’m not so sure. I think the “school within a school” phenomenon you get when you have a separate AP or IB track within an urban school may be worse, because it sends immediate, unmistakable, visually stark, daily images of racial and socioeconomic segregation. But it is a huge problem anyway you slice it, one our society doesn’t seem to want to deal with.</p>
<p>The first AP offered at Ds school for most kids is AP Euro, in 10th grade.
At least one local high school has dropped AP Euro for some & now requires AP human geography for all.</p>
We’re looking into other, pricier alternatives.</p>