Are AP tests the biggest scam in American Education?

<p>So I was on Twitter and my cousin posted this opinion article from the Huffington Post about AP tests.</p>

<p>AP</a> Exams Are the Biggest Scam in American Education (OPINION)</p>

<p>The article is basically saying that AP classes aren't equal to college courses like people say/think they are. It also said that AP classes aren't taught by college professors and can differ by school and teacher. Some classes are difficult, some classes are a joke. Which is true.</p>

<p>Another interesting part was when they said there was a study and they had some students take a Darthmouth Intro to Psych final and 90% didn't pass.</p>

<p>What do you think?</p>

<p>“aren’t taught by college professors”</p>

<p>Hell, neither are college classes half the time.</p>

<p>I think AP will be gone in the next few years and the IB program will become more prevalent.</p>

<p>I admit, I didn’t read the article, but have heard this same argument before.</p>

<p>All in all: It depends on the teacher. For example, my AP World teacher most definitely teaches at a college level. I’ve heard all the AP teachers at my school are exceptional. At other schools though, they aren’t as good. Luck of the draw. Now dual enrollment classes, they are definitely college level since they are taught by college professors (IMO & at my schools at least). </p>

<p>AP gets a lot of flak, but I think they are pretty helpful.</p>

<p>So how do you tell if your school’s AP courses are sufficiently challenging?
(Lol, don’t say “they’ll actually be hard” because I’m not all that smart and a lot of stuff is hard for me that probably isn’t for normal CCers.)</p>

<p>@halcyonheather if your class has the same rigor as any of your other classes, than it probably isn’t challenging…</p>

<p>Is it free?
Yes
Is it better than the alternative (honors course)?
Yes
Do you get something out of it (college credits)?
Yes</p>

<p>I don’t see how such a thing could be a scam. Now they may not be quite up to the standards of a school like Dartmouth, but then few things will prepare you for a final at a school like that other than actually taking the course and knowing the expectations for it. You also don’t mention the Dartmouth students taking the AP test. It would be interesting to see what their pass rate would be. Perhaps they simply learn different things?</p>

<p>It’s right to some extent - AP Physics C, for instance, is a poor joke imitation of a college class. However, I think that American education would not be as good as it is today if not for the advent of AP courses/tests.</p>

<p>I could not agree more with this article. I wish you didn’t post it though, because it’s just making me more depressed. Collegeboard can die.</p>

<p>I thought it was funny they used AP psych for the study. AP psych is arguably one of the easiest AP exams to take. I wish they would’ve done one of history or english exams instead.</p>

<p>“if your class has the same rigor as any of your other classes, than it probably isn’t challenging…”</p>

<p>Oh, they’re definitely more difficult than honors, but honors generally isn’t challenging at all where I live and I don’t know that they’re as difficult as they would be in college. </p>

<p>Still, though, they’re better than honors, and I don’t know that most schools would be able to come up with reasonably challenging courses on their own if it wasn’t for AP prepackaged stuff. They’re not FREE but they definitely don’t cost anywhere near what a course at a college costs.</p>

<p>ha AP Psych is a joke. its pretty much the same level the college equilvent</p>

<p>I’m surprised how anyone can find these arguments convincing.
The first half of the article:
No argument provided against AP exams. A complete waste of space
The [article[/url</a>] linked to about the Dartmouth thing doesn’t really provide enough info about the issue. For one thing, taking a final exam several months after studying for the subject will obviously result in less than stellar scores. I’m sure if you give the Dartmouth final to students who’ve actually taken the class there several months after they’ve taken the class (and haven’t reviewed) they wouldn’t do so well either. And it is strange how they can generalize performance on the AP Psychology exam (universally known to be one of the easier ones) to not only the entire AP curriculum but IB as well. How can you tell whether the knowledge gained in, say AP Calculus BC or IB Math HL is insufficient based on some students’ (and likely different students) performance on a psychology final taken some time after studying? And even if 4s or 5s on AP exams are not comparable to Dartmouth courses - so what? It’s an ivy league university! You can’t say that since the standards of the AP exams are insufficient for an ivy league school (which is of course debatable - see my previous few sentences) they are insufficient for the local nonresearch university down the street. I think a more plausible hypothesis is that they were looking for some excuse to not give free credit and pounced on this opportunity - given the circumstances described above, it seems quite strange.</p>

<p>“They’re not taught by professors.”
So what? A lot of my university classes aren’t taught by professors either. There is nothing inherent about being a professor that enables them to to better impart knowledge on a lower division introductory college level (which AP exams are about).</p>

<p>"They have fundamentally different curriculums.’
Not true - this is easy to compare by downloading syllabi from most schools and comparing them to the content of AP exams.</p>

<p>“And, most importantly, they’re too damn inconsistent.”
College classes can be (and are) inconsistent as well. And this doesn’t matter, because for AP the credit is determined by the end of year exam, which is just about as consistent as you can get - it’s the same difficultly for every person taking it.</p>

<p>

Huh? How many college classes have you taken or experienced? Not only do colleges offer non calculus based physics for students majoring something like biology instead of physical sciences or engineering, but they offer even lower levels for students that don’t need physics at all in their major and just need to fulfill some science general ed class. For example, take a look at this [url=<a href=“EEE+ Home | UCI”>EEE+ Home | UCI]recently</a> administered midterm](<a href=“Dartmouth Stops Credits for Excelling on A.P. Test - The New York Times”>Dartmouth Stops Credits for Excelling on A.P. Test - The New York Times) for a super basic physics class at my university (they offer much harder classes as well so don’t generalize the easiness of this particular exam to all of the other physics classes offered).</p>

<p>I really like AP. Some really don’t take it as college credit, and many high schools are aware and tell you that it prolly won’t. But for some people in not so great schools, honors classes kinda get too easy and it provides a really good challenge. Plus you’re around kids of your academic level. I really think if it a super honors and it helps you stand out from other people at your school.</p>

<p>To be honest, College Board in general is kind of terrible. Someone earlier said AP is free. It most certainly isn’t.</p>

<p>While I support having standardised exams at that level (preferably higher) that people can choose to take, I think AP goes about it entirely the wrong way.</p>

<p>Depending on the subjects, the curriculum is often not that good. The history exams, for example, focus too much on trying to teach /everything/ that happened within a certain geographic area rather than actually taking a detailed look at what has happened.</p>

<p>The level of difficulty is also inconsistent. Human Geography is at about what we call “standard grade” level over here (usually done /not/ as an advanced class by people in the equivalent to sophomore year) whereas Calculus BC is closer to Advanced Higher level Maths (taken in the equivalent of senior year).</p>

<p>Additionally, many of the tests are too reliant on multi-choice and have other similar problems.</p>

<p>I do think that the IB is significantly better, but I think the problem also lies in the fact these programmes are seen as “advanced” in the US. Beside a ridiculous amount of other requirements, yes, they’re challenging, but the fact remains that IB is not a great step up from the standard sequence for Scottish students going on to attend university (drop one of the HL subjects and TOK and you’ve pretty much got the average sequence in my school but with an added distribution requirement).</p>

<p>Really, the problem lies in the fact people are looking for “college equivalent” courses rather than just a good, rigorous curriculum presented so as to be accessible to everyone.</p>

<p>They’re the second biggest scam after SAT/ACT testing and the most widespread.</p>

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<p>I’ve taken 3 college level classes so far. My post compared AP Physics C to a typical college freshman level calculus-based physics course. Let’s look at topics that the former omits:
Waves: Waves are one of the most important topics in mechanics, and they just decided not to include them.
Thermodynamics: Yeah, so they just decided to remove an entire branch of physics from consideration.
AC Circuits: They leave out what is potentially one of the most applied part of the entire physics course.
Electromagnetic Waves
Optics, Diffraction & Interference
Relativity (Let’s stop it with the snide comments).</p>

<p>As you can see, AP Physics C is clearly a watered-down version of the course it tries to imitate. Also, it doesn’t go into enough depth - topics like angular oscillators, damped SHM, and mutual induction are omitted as well. Many AP Physics courses do explore one or two of these, but the exam doesn’t. </p>

<p>

Now what about AP courses, rather than the exams?</p>

<p>How are SAT/ACT exams “scams”? How else are colleges supposed to be provided a metric by which to measure all applicants?</p>

<p>@efeens44 - With a publicly funded exam board with non-multiple-choice questions and differentiation between different subjects (of which there should be more than simply maths and English). It’s pretty simple.</p>

<p>^
No, those are the wrong reasons. A non-multiple choice test would be difficult to grade, given that ~1.5 million students take the SAT annually. The SAT IIs test subjects besides math and English.</p>