<p>" parents didn’t even consider opting dropping down a level, even for kids who deeply disliked the subject.</p>
<p>I think these are highly competitive families, with kids that are generally headed for applications to “top"colleges.”</p>
<p>Pushing your kid to take difficult classes in a subject they dislike is a parent problem. Insisting that your kid work nonstop and not get enough sleep because your ambition is for your kid to attend a top college is a parent problem. The only way the school can protect kids from parents like this is to limit what students can do. Should my child’s opportunities be limited because there are pushy, abusive, parents out there? My daughter really came alive in high school once she got out of those “honors” classes and into AP classes. She’s excited about nearly every one of them, and even for those one or two she wasn’t wild about, she still thought it was better than the non-AP alternatives.</p>
<p>It’s a very flawed metric and a silly list. </p>
<p>That list says it’s about average students but it includes magnets. Just because somewhere out there in a very wealthy community there exists a public school with higher SAT scores doesn’t mean that those magnet or otherwise privileged schools have “average” students. Obviously they don’t. To do this study properly, you need to look at how many students with SAT scores in an “average” range are enrolled in AP classes. </p>
<p>The AP tests are pricey, even for middle class families. These numbers could be vastly skewed by whether families want to pay for the exams, especially for graduating seniors who may not get a benefit from their chosen college. Huge socioeconomic bias.</p>
<p>Some high schools offer dual enrollment classes. That drains students out of AP. Not accounted for at all.</p>
<p>Averages don’t tell you about average students. You can have a high school where 10% are high-achievers taking 10 AP classes and the rest take none, and that meets the standard defined by the author as 1 per student. Yet none of the average students have been challenged at all by his own definition.</p>
<p>I don’t consider putting a student who is grossly underprepared into an AP class and then having them get a 1 or 2 on an exam any kind of success. It should not be counted as such. The AP tests really aren’t all that hard and there is something very wrong with a school’s AP program if a substantial number of students cannot score at least a 3. Yet he doesn’t look at the scores. Any school could decide to top this list simply by signing up all their students to take AP exams. Ridiculous.</p>
<p>Out of curiousity, I looked up the relevant info for our school system and found that it should be on that list, but it’s not. So in addition to all the aforementioned flaws, the list isn’t complete.</p>
<p>Perhaps the push of non-top students into AP courses, and the mission creep of AP into high school frosh level courses and other “AP lite” courses is also a result of a dumbed down* regular “college prep” high school curriculum in many high schools.</p>
<p>*Not necessarily any more dumbed down than before, though.</p>
<p>My high school is the highest ranked for my state on the list, and the only from my state in the top 100. It has, I believe, the most AP classes of any public school in the US. With so many APs available, it’s no surprise that many students take them. </p>
<p>I don’t feel that unprepared students were encouraged to take APs due to our high school’s quite strict tracking system. Students must test into the 6 year high school in 7th grade in the first place, and the top 25% of 7th graders are shuttled into an Honors program for 8th and 9th grades that then leads to APs. Those who were in the bottom 75% in 7th grade were rarely taking many APs, even three years later in 10th grade. It seemed like they were encouraged not to and like they were more likely to be denied admission into the tougher APs for which one had to apply to the instructors.</p>
<p>I actually think it’s quite a negative for the school though. Students shouldn’t be so strictly separated based on their 7th grade performance.</p>
<p>Strangely, they rank private schools too using the same crierteria, but many of the private schools includng the ones that helped pioneer the AP program (Phillips Academy, Phillips Exeter Academy and Lawrenceville School) voluntarily abandoned all or most of the AP courses from their curriculums. The general consensus in these schools is that AP courses are too restrictive and their students and teachers don’t really benefit from those “guidelines” imposed. Instead they offer AP level or post AP level courses that are not marked AP and not taught to solely meet the AP tests’ requiremets. Of course, many students from these schools do take AP exams but that’s another story and I don’t think the ranking takes that into account?</p>
<p>How would you suggest ranking students for college admission?</p>
<ol>
<li>GPA is very subjective. </li>
<li>SAT - ACT test, mainly, an ability to take test. SAT math covers Algebra 2, maximum. </li>
<li>Olympiads are not for everyone. </li>
</ol>
<p>AP exams were designed as an opportunity for kids to learn independently. Surprisingly, adcoms don’t seem to care about AP exams in the absence of AP classes offered by HS.</p>
<p>Not seeing it Jonri. If a student takes 4/5 years of a FL in HS (and perhaps the AP test), that usually is enough to pass a ‘reading’ exam for grad school. Then, said history major can take a few classes as an undergrad in a 2nd lang. But since many high schools don’t have the resources for a lot of foreign language courses, it may be better to wait until undergrad anyway. Actually, if you look further into the H website, you’ll see that the lang requirement for a certain history majors include languages rarely taught in HS, such as Russian.</p>
<p>(Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that AP Psych should be taken over a second lang in HS…)</p>
<p>“AP exams were designed as an opportunity for kids to learn independently. Surprisingly, adcoms don’t seem to care about AP exams in the absence of AP classes offered by HS”</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure the AP program was designed for kids to be able to study college-level material in high school classes. I highly doubt the college board expected kids to be spending a few days cramming with test prep books, then walking in and passing their exams. The fact that this is possible casts some doubt on the rigor of the exams.</p>
<p>I really don’t know what the adcoms think about it, but my guess is they would look favorably on a student who self-studied AP exams in their area(s) of interest to accelerate their academic program (eg learning calculus then taking a more advanced class at a college) or when the opportunity to take a class in their area of interest wasn’t available at their high school. I also guess that they may look skeptically at the high school junior who develops a sudden and immediately passing interest in things like Hum Geo and Psych, apparently just to pad their resume with a few easy AP scores. Just my opinion.</p>
<p>“But taking a beginning foreign language won’t boost the kid’s class standing in the same way as taking AP psych ( a known gut many colleges won’t accept for AP credit) or AP environmental science or any other AP class. So, the kid caves to the pressure and takes one of these instead.”</p>
<p>Unless there’s a huge scholarship at stake, this kid is simply chasing prestige and I don’t have a lot of sympathy. Not even sure it would help in college admissions, because if the kid took the second language and noted on the application they did so because they knew it would be helpful for graduate and professional study in their chosen field, what college won’t respect that? Would they really say, no, you should have taken AP Psych instead?</p>
<p>Not to say I think any weighting scheme is fair. But my daughter had to make choices like that several times in high school, and she chose several times to pursue her various interests in ways which hurt her weighted GPA. We have no regrets.</p>
<p>The kid I talked about was real. He was aiming for the very top colleges from a mediocre public high school where very few people tried for the top colleges. His GC really did tell him that if he wasn’t val or sal–and taking the college courses eliminated that possibility–there was no way he would get into a top school. </p>
<p>You can think that’s nonsense. I already said I do. But this is the advice a guidance counselor was giving. </p>
<p>Plus, there are all cases in which being in the top 10% is required to get into an “honors college” or some such program. Choosing to bypass several APs can mean you won’t be in the top 10%.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>“highly doubt the college board expected kids to be spending a few days cramming with test prep books, then walking in and passing their exams.”</p></li>
<li><p>"I also guess that they may look skeptically at the high school junior who develops a sudden and immediately passing interest in things like Hum Geo and Psych, apparently just to pad their resume with a few easy AP scores. "</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Why do they have to look skeptically at the kids that mastered AP exams without HS AP classes? Why? Even if it is Hum Geo and Psych, apparently just to pad their resume with a few easy AP scores? </p>
<p>" this kid is simply chasing prestige and I don’t have a lot of sympathy. "</p>
<p>Kid is chasing a chance to be admitted to the college of his dream. What’s wrong with this? He is playing by the rules of the game; it is not his fault that the rules are illogical.</p>
<p>USA is the only country in the world that applies “holistic approach”. IF you apply to math dept in Oxford, UK, Oxford is looking at your math skills. That is simple and fair. If you apply to Harvard math, you are expected to submit info about athletic skills, sexual orientation, nationality, color of your skin, your parents income, second language, and childhood trauma. </p>
<p>GPA is part of the admission game. If they give an extra point for Spanish AP, my D will take Spanish AP, even though it is a waste of time for her, academically. She knows Spanish, she doesn’t need HS to teach her Spanish, she is not planning a career in Spanish. Is it a waste of time for her (and resources for school) to teach her Spanish? Yes. But it is not her fault. It’s the rules of the game. </p>
<p>In my view this whole AP craze it out of control. High School curriculums should teach high school level courses. Period. We are beginning to blur the lines between high school and college. I have always wondered how this affects the colleges from a financial standpoint. If they are giving college credits for AP courses doesn’t that mean the student graduates earlier or takes that many fewer classes? I would think that affects revenue.</p>
<p>If they have to offer AP classes, then they should be offered to students in their area of strength or interest only. So math/science students would be eligible to take 2 in those areas and english/history/language types could take 2 in their areas. But this race to cram in as many Ap’s as possible is lunacy. Students are stressed out, teachers are sick of teaching to the AP curriculum (which is a rigid one) and colleges are receiving freshmen that have placed out of the normal freshman curriculum.</p>
<p>I don’t like the idea of limiting students taking AP classes as much as I don’t like the idea of cramming as many into the classes as possible. My sophomore year I only took one AP class, my junior year I decided I was ready to take four at a time, and now my senior year I have 6. I don’t see the “stress” that comes with the classes, perhaps time management needs to be taught in schools. If my school had a policy of limiting students, I would probably have fought it. It makes financial sense for me, I’ll be attending my state flagship in the fall and will transfer in with 41 credits from AP; which allows me to graduate two semesters early and save money for law school.</p>
<p>The line has been blurry for decades in terms of appropriate course content. Not every college-bound high school student (or college student) advances at the same pace, so both high schools and colleges have to make provisions for students who straddle the line between what is normally “high school senior level” and “college frosh level” material.</p>
<p>For example, many high school seniors are intellectually ready for college frosh level material; completing trigonometry and precalculus as a high school junior and being ready to take calculus as a high school senior is an obvious example. Going the other way, many college frosh need remedial (from a college point of view) courses in (for example) what is normally high school level algebra, trigonometry, and precalculus before being ready to take calculus in college.</p>
<p>AP, in its earlier forms (as opposed to the current proliferation of “AP lite” courses), was meant to allow high school seniors to show knowledge of college frosh level material in a way that colleges can more easily understand, rather than having to individually evaluate each high school’s calculus (etc.) course. Such students could take advanced placement in those subjects, allowing them to complete course work at a more advanced level, or have extra free electives, instead of repeating college frosh level material that they already know.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you look at college policies with respect to credit units, you may find that public universities tend to be generous with credit units for AP scores, while private universities are often much less generous. That follows from the financial incentives – most public university students are on subsidized in-state tuition, so getting them to graduate early (or not late) reduces the tuition subsidy spend on any given student. On the other hand, private universities have financial incentives to avoid having students graduate early.</p>
<p>Of course, that only applies to credit units; subject credit and advanced placement for AP scores may be different from the granting of credit units at the same university.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some students actually are ready for advanced level material in more than two subjects. Why limit them? Trying to solve the problem of the excessive push into “AP lite” courses by limiting what the best students can do is not a good solution.</p>
<p>Why do you assume that kids have such limited areas of interest?</p>
<p>Some kids are interested in literature AND science AND languages AND history, and fully capable of carrying 5 or 6 AP classes and a full year of ECs without breaking a sweat. Why hold them back?</p>