"Clamor for AP classes alters program's intent"

Parent Cafe
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<p>Good article on the CB and its AP program - after reading "Clamor for AP classes alters program's intent: College Board pushes quality control" , I have to ask just how common is it for students to take an AP class and not take the exam?</p>

<p>"AP classes are intended to prepare high school students for college-level exams. If they score high enough, many colleges award course credit. But the pressure to pack high school transcripts with AP classes has grown so intense that it now often overshadows the program's original intent.</p>

<p>For the first time, the organization that runs the program nationwide is scrutinizing the quality of the classes schools offer.</p>

<p>"We heard from an AP world history teacher who had no textbooks or college-level materials," said Susan Landers, director of AP program development for the College Board. "We have heard of AP Latin courses that teach the English-language version of Virgil. ... This is unfair to the students, and it is unfair to the college admissions offices."</p>

<p>Quality control</p>

<p>Beginning this month, the College Board is requiring all teachers of AP classes to submit materials showing that their courses meet the program's standards.</p>

<p>Nichols, the chairwoman of Broughton's English department, understands the need for the audit.</p>

<p>"I'm sure there are schools where it's possible to take AP classes and get AP credit, but whose students are not prepared for the exam," she said...</p>

<p>The students' payoff</p>

<p>Students are encouraged to enroll in AP courses because they look good on high school transcripts and the courses help boost grade point averages and class rankings. In a regular class, an A is worth four points on a four-point scale. But subjects taken as an AP class earn six points on a four-point scale, which is how top students achieve grade points above the traditional top grade of 4.0. ...</p>

<p>"One of the greatest indicators of college success is the rigor of the high school program," Polk said.</p>

<p>Skipping the exams</p>

<p>While most students in Nichols' 11th-grade AP class said they planned to take the AP exam, that's not always the case.</p>

<p>As AP class enrollments have surged, many students never bother to take the tests that determine whether they mastered the material.</p>

<p>Enrollment in AP environmental science, for example, has more than doubled in recent years, making it one of the most popular AP subjects. But barely 60 percent of students taking the course took the exam in 2005.</p>

<p>Average scores on all AP exams taken by public school students in North Carolina were largely unchanged between 2002 and 2005, just under the score of 3 -- on a 5 point scale -- that colleges consider as a minimum to earn college credit. Scores of 4 or even 5 are now often required.</p>

<p>Neither the College Board nor the State Board of Education require students to take the exams to earn high school credit for the courses, but at least two districts -- Chapel Hill-Carrboro and the Guilford County schools -- make the tests mandatory. Both districts help students cover the costs.</p>

<p>"The whole goal of the course is to help kids get ready to take a difficult test," said Dave Thaden, principal of East Chapel Hill High School. "Students don't sign up for the class for the points and then not be held accountable."</p>

<p>Ann Barr, who oversees the AP program for Guilford County schools, agreed that both the course and the test are integral parts of the program.</p>

<p>"The value of an AP course is the process of taking a more rigorous course and the opportunity of gaining college credit," she said.</p>

<p>It's not that all students don't see the wisdom of the bigger picture painted by people like Thaden and Barr. But as top-flight high school students with big plans for college and career plans, they have a tighter focus on why they need the classes.""</p>

<p><a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/527792.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/527792.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>My daughter took several AP courses but took only one exam. The only reason she took the courses was to improve the way her college applications looked.</p>

<p>From her perspective and mine, both as a parent and as a university instructor, AP classes prepare students to take a test. That's it. They DO NOT prepare students for college-level courses (at least, not writing courses, which is what I teach).</p>

<p>I am not sure what the AP folks mean by "rigor." My daughter's AP English classes didn't resemble anything we do at the college level. Nearly all college freshmen I teach are shocked that what they learned in high school English, even AP, bears no resemblance to what they're asked to do in college. </p>

<p>I have not seen the actual AP standards. All I know is that in a practical sense, AP English doesn't help students succeed in college writing courses. In fact, over the 12 years I have been teaching those courses, I have seen a steady decline in writing skills as more students take AP. Interesting, isn't it?</p>

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<p>Another translation: AP is hearing the footsteps of IB, for which quality control and standardized grading at every level is a central value (and a value-adder, especially for schools that don't start out with their own prestige).</p>

<p>And I agree with what sloparent says -- AP English is a college course only in the sense that we've completely accepted the notion that kids come out of high school with only the most rudimentary critical reading and writing skills, so colleges need to teach a lot of students that.</p>

<p>I don't want to hijack this thread, but maybe someday I'll start one on teaching writing. No one does it well. No one ever taught me to write, but at least they commented on my papers, both substance and style. My daughter -- always way above grade level as a writer, but with lots of room for improvement -- had exactly one teacher (in a one-quarter course) who ever gave her serious comments on a paper. Mostly, the others just circled about every other grammatical error and spelling mistake. My son is nowhere near the writer his sister was, but he still gets very little constructive criticism of anything he writes. There's a near-complete failure to teach.</p>

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<p>at my Ds school, you must tak the AP exam if in an AP class....this is something that was debated on this site a long time ago</p>

<p>when you have kids taking 20 ap classes in HS, but no exams, one wonders about the quailty of the class</p>

<p>and with colleges pushing a "rigorous" courseload, meaning lots of APs, it turns out that often rigorous is in name only</p>

<p>and don't get me started on AP Calc as a necessity....</p>

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<p>I know that the IB courses are supposed to help with writing- which are being offered in two seattle schools this year & I was quite impressed with the program, however, I wanted to allow D the majority of the decision of which high school to attend. </p>

<p>She has only taken the AP history courses, she didnt have to take the test for Euro, but the district is requiring everyone to take the APUSH exam, which she will do this year.</p>

<p>I also find it amusing that while the Newsweek list trumpets the rankings of schools where many students take AP courses, it doesn't list the scores or percentages of those who also take the AP tests.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7773524/site/newsweek/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7773524/site/newsweek/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>As she won't be attending a college that will give credit for the tests/or needing advanced placement in classes- I don't think it is necessary to take the tests, for her-</p>

<p>While her school does offer the most AP courses in the state ( for public school), they also have several subjects in which AP courses are not offered, as the dept feels they have designed a course that more fully reflects the depth of knowledge that is needed for the subject- </p>

<p>My older daughter is a natural writer, and she was fortunate to have attended ( private)schools that supported and encouraged her development in writing.
Her college requires a * great deal* of writing and reading, including a graduation requirement of a thesis for all students. While many students did take AP courses in their high schools, few used the courses to either get credit or obtain advanced standing, an exception is made for language credit.</p>

<p>While colleges, especially on the east coast are more familar with AP courses that are taken for extra challenge in high school, rather than the community college courses that students on the west coast sometimes take, a recent study seems to find that AP courses don't prepare students as much as we may have thought for college.
<a href="http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/02/17-ap.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/02/17-ap.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>Our high school has a policy to limit the number of AP classes a student can schedule at one time(3) and also permits only jr and seniors to take them. Students can petition to take more or take them as a soph but this rarely happens. </p>

<p>As a result, teachers can teach them as college equivalent classes because they are not populated by underclass students and the class assignments can be college equivalent because their student are taking no more than 3 classes. </p>

<p>Finally the grading is very strict and an A only awarded for excellent work. For instance our son received a grade of 83%(B= ?) in APCalcBC but received a 5 on the AP exam. He also has gotten 2-A's and 1-B in the math courses taken at RPI thus far. APUSH, the same thing. Assigned two texts and 2 supplemental readings books plus a final research paper with primary sources required. He did his on an analysis of the African American population changes in our county in the post-Civil war period.</p>

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<p>If somebody today ( on the Kamchatka peninsula) posted on a bulletin board that his relative ( a Harvard adcom's boyfriend) said that they had a secret Harvard memo telling adcom's to look for more students in next year's admissions class who had taken woodshop - you'd see an overnight rise in woodshop students and a call for AP woodshop. Not to mention a controversy over who whittled the prize winning entry, and another over whether hillbillys should be held to a higher whittlin' standard.</p>

<p>"Alters program's intent"? This was news to the CB?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
...another over whether hillbillys should be held to a higher whittlin' standard.

[/quote]
LOL! I didn't know that Jian Li was a whittler.</p>

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<p>SS, so maybe not as subtle as I'd hoped, huh? Oh, well. ;)</p>

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<p>I hope the College Board won't be too rigid about the content of AP courses.</p>

<p>My daughter's school, which has an IB diploma program, has been very successful in combining AP classes with Standard Level IB classes in the same subject. It may sound odd, but it works. </p>

<p>If the College Board insists on uniformity in curricula, though, it may no longer work.</p>

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<p>The AP program doesn't impress me, at least not as it is actually carried out. My daughter will have had 8 AP's by the time she graduates, and she will take exams for all (required by her school). She is doing this to challenge herself in high school, not to get advanced standing in college (her college choices would make that difficult, anyway). </p>

<p>D sat in on intro psych classes at DePauw & Rhodes and found them far more interesting than her AP psych class. Seem AP classes simply shove a bunch of required material down the kids' throats, as much & as quickly as possible. Her AP chem teacher felt frustrated by the requirements of the program. D hates AP bio ... says she is no longer interested in bio as a result. I told her bio at the type of school she will attend is bound to be more interesting than the AP lectures. Yes, some may be the teacher, but given the way AP is set up, I am more inclined to think it's the program.</p>

<p>I took a class in my senior year called Project Advance English, which my MI high school teacher taught on behalf of Syracuse U (I had to pay for the credit hours!). This class prepared me far better as a writer than the 2 AP English classes D has had. Her teachers are wonderful, but the AP content just isn't the same as my Syracuse class. We didn't have to do a bunch of multiple choice stuff like in AP, but we did have to do some extremely in-depth literary analysis. As a result, AP Comp/AP Lit haven't impressed me.</p>

<p>In addition, the AP courses in the public school district in which I substitute teach are pretty pathetic. They are graded more leniently than AP courses at D's private school, and the fact that exams aren't required keeps the district from understanding that their system is flawed. Colleges need to understand that AP's are indeed subject to the same school-to-school differences as any type of class. They don't seem to care, because they don't want the exam grades. I don't get it.</p>

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<p>I always thought that the value of an AP course was that it provided a curriculum guide as to what materials had to be covered in such a course, with a test that showed how thoroughly those materials were covered. The value such a course and test brings is information about a school's curriculum and how thoroughly and well taught these kids are. This is particularly valuable for kids going to schools that are not on selective college's radars. The AP level is supposed to be high enough and the tests thorough enough to assess the difficulty level of the course, and the student. Because the test is much more comprehensive, and the grading is by hand on the essay/short answer portions, it is far more informative than the shorter SAT 2 subject tests, particularly in math where the advanced math is not really addressed. For a kid living in an outlying school, the school's record in AP testing and the kid's own AP results, if he can get a couple done junior year, can give a college a better idea as to what is being covered in the school. If the school has a curriculum but the kids are not doing well or not taking the exam, it is not going to help the kid looking for that boost when applying to selective colleges. On the other had, there may be a school that does have a number of AP courses, and the kids do tend to get 4's and 5's on the tests. A good student taking a number of those courses, who has done well on the SATS can then be checked as a student with a rigorous curriculum behind him. Though top colleges say that they assess a kid given his opportunities and if there are no AP courses available or just a few at his highschool, he is still considered having taken the toughest curriculum offered, the stats clearly show that kids who do well at schools with the more rigorous curriculums tend to get into these select colleges at much higher rates. The AP is supposed to be a tool to level the playing field. </p>

<p>In my opinion that is still how the AP works. In schools where the AP is offered, and there are a lot of kid wanting to go to selective colleges, there is a clamor and rush to stack up on those courses. If the track record of that highschool is not good on AP scores, however, I don't know how much good that is going to do for these eager beaver kids. I came from the midwest where our highschool which was considered one of the elite publics in the area, and they have many AP offerings. So many kids want those courses (or parents push for those courses) that there is heavy gatekeeping and much parent lobbying and insisting. The classes end up overcrowed after the parents get a number of kids that did not officially get the course. Well, the results are not hot. Just a tad over 3. Most kids ony take a course or two as a junior and then try to stack up as a senior. With a school record of AP's being at that average, colleges are not going to assume that the current year seniors are going to blow the lid off the AP that year. Unless a kid does really well with his two APs (if he has them) as a junior, his curriculum is just not going to get the boost everyone imagines that he will get. THe college placement record of this school shows this as well, since very few kids get into the most selective schools. I live near a top highschool here, and many kids take AP courses; with the average being in the 4 range, just a little lower than my sons' private school. So kids in such schools are presumed to do well on the APs given the schools' records. In fact, my sons' school does not have AP designation for a number of courses, but many kids take the AP exam for them anyways and do well, so the curriculum tends to be highly rated just by the virtue of going to such a school. In this case, the only benefit of taking the APs is for the college credit or byes you can get by taking them, since it's not going to matter in terms of how colleges view your transcript.</p>

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<p>D had an AP Bio teacher who just wouldn't teach the plant part. Wasn't interested . Didn't teach it. He told them it was going to be on the AP test and made review material available to them. He also did not require the AP test be taken. The spent a great deal of time dissecting things and doing lab "stuff" instead. Quite odd, really. But she muddled through.</p>

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<p>


cptn, would you share those stats with us? I would like to see them.</p>

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<p>Perhaps I've just been lucky but DD has taken AP English and is a much better writer than I ever was at her age. While I have seen arguments made about AP not being as rigorous as college classes, I have also seen contrary arguments about there being no consistent qualitative standards for college classes that AP does have.</p>

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<p>I am a senior this year and I too have some major problems with the AP program. I attend a very competitive high school where it is common for students to take 6 or more AP courses. Many kids aim for 10. I personally will have finished school having taken 6 of these courses, 4 of which were required. The other two were in a subject (European History) that I really wanted to take and the continuation of one of my language courses (the new Russian course). </p>

<p>Based on my experiences with the APs, the courses themselves are not much fun. I had some really great teachers last year and this year, but I found that often there was such a rush to cover AP material that the teachers couldn't teach as much of the material that they were interested in. For example, one history teacher (US) was a retired navy officer and he really loved military history, which I am sure he would have been very good at teaching, but since we had to cover a certain amount of material before the exam, he couldn't teach it. In addition, I found that we had no time to do assignments that would really be helpful for a college level history class, like research papers. We did do a couple, but I never really felt like I was in a college course. The focus on tests and timed writings (which are ridiculous measures of writing/analytical skill if you ask me... students merely spit back memorized facts in an organized fashion) took away time from more substantial things.</p>

<p>In addition, I found that the crunch for AP classes on college apps brought a lot of kids into certain classes who were not interested in the subject and as a result, that took away from the intellectual value of the course. Instead of actually caring about analyzing the topics assigned, many people were instead focused on getting an A or a 5. Nothing wrong with that, but I had been hoping for classes where people were truly interested. </p>

<p>If you ask me, I think it is too bad that colleges focus so much (or at least we perceive that they focus so much) on the number of advanced courses, rather than the student's individual intellectual pursuits. For me, I decided it would be more valuable to take classes that would be useful for me in the future (some non-AP modern history and politics classes and Chinese 1) instead of AP science courses that I was not interested in. I also know students that have forfeited the IB diploma or extra APs to pursue extra courses in comp sci or math that were of interest. It seems like this approach is frowned upon by some these days.</p>

<p>I am not completely against the AP program; I have had some truly talented teachers teach wonderful AP courses, but I think it has many problems. It is too bad that our society is so standardized test focused and that we can not branch out and find better alternatives to the APs.</p>

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<p>6 points for an A? </p>

<p>Wow...at my school (way back in 2001 when I graduated) we got .05 per semester added for each AP or specified honors class we took during the Junior and Senior years...I'm pretty sure it's still the same now, but 6 points is ridiculous. My AP classes for the most part were outstanding, with my AP US History really typifying a college course, but the rest weren't really as demanding...</p>

<p>Are there other places offering 6 points for an A in an AP class?</p>

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<p>The AP program has been a good learning experience for both of my kids. Their school only offers 15 AP and the final exam is obligatory. My S took 12 AP courses that ended given him 37 college credits. My D will have 9 by the end of her senior year, depending how many 5 she gets; she could have up to 30 credits next year in college. They were lucky to have great teachers with knowledge and the right material to master all the courses before the tests.</p>

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<p>davushka, very well stated!</p>

<p>I am not "against" AP classes & I think they are a good thing. However, the big push is now "AP for ALL college-bound kids." No program is perfect for everyone. I am afraid that the AP program is now being looked upon as just that. If top students decide to take a different path (such as pursuing extra coursework in an area of interest), rather than taking all the AP's, they can be at a disadvantage in admissions --- or, more importantly to those of us who struggle to pay for college --- merit scholarships. I am not saying "will," just "can." </p>

<p>There just may be some alternatives to AP in the future, but we have to allow the creativity for that to happen. If AP is pushed as the be all & end all that may not happen.</p>

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<p>


I' msure you've checked this but I'll ask anyway - Are you doing that calculation correctly? Those numbers seem off to me. Semester hours? D had only AP BIO, AP ENGLIT, APCALC BC (and the C part was self-study) and that was 24 semester hours of credit.</p>