Which student grades? AP exams are in May, with scores available in July. Our high school, as I suspect most do, have four grading periods with final grades in June. I don’t see how requiring the AP exam addresses assigning grades through the year. Even colleges don’t base a student’s entire grade on one, course-end test.
How much leeway do UK universities give on missing the predicted scores on A-level exams that are basically the entire course grades for the associated courses?
Good question. And keep in mind that for US applicants, Oxbridge offers are also conditional on test scores, not transcript
Paging @collegemom3717
Fwiw, this report is pretty awesome. I’m going to pass it on to our BoE Superintendent as a suggestion.
Is this data commonly available in other school districts?
Have not heard of similar reports from other schools or districts.
There seems to be huge variation from test to test.
For example, math course grade appears to be well correlated with AP exam grade. 40% of students with A grades receive a 5 and 62% receive 4+; but only 9% of students with a B grade receive a 5 and 24% 4+.
Physics also shows a correlation with grade, but the average AP grade in Physics 1 appears to be only 1.45. So regardless of what grade the students get in the class, the most common grade on AP exam is 1. Perhaps many district physics teachers are deviating from the AP exam content?
Arts has less correlation. ‘A’ grade students in Arts appear to be more likely to get extreme AP scores – more likely to get 5 and also more likely to get a 1. While B and C students seem more likely to get middle scores.
In this example, I’d expect a lot of physics and arts teachers to be bad at reporting accurate predictions of AP score, which hinders the one of the key claimed benefits of having a standardized test – standardized results instead of varying grading scales between different teachers/classes/schools.
Prior to COVID, I believe ~half of states required nearly all students to take either the ACT or SAT, usually ACT as part of the statewide testing requirements for measuring and comparing student performance. This degree of participation makes having a mandatory requirement straightforward (prior to COVID). Mandatory requirements are not as practical for exams with much smaller or more varied participation, such as subject tests, which relates to why so few colleges required them. Requiring AP/IB would be even more problematic due to a large portion of students having limited access.
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Depends on the course and the uni- as you would expect the more competitive the course & uni, the more likely you are to lose the offer. Cambridge has a rep for being particularly unforgiving (I know directly of a student who missed her offer (which included the STEP paper) by 1 point (with some mitigating circumstances), and lost her place. I know several Oxford applicants that have lost their place after not meeting their offer- but I also know at least two who kept in (in both cases the offer was A* and the achieved was an A, not exactly a flaming miss!).
Teachers & schools in the UK get very good at predicting, and the schools that aim to send a lot of students to the top unis work hard to protect a reputation for accuracy (thereby potentially increasing their students chances, as the unis hate dealing with students who miss their offer, so the hope is that in a tight call, the student from the school with a good rep will pip the place). That can have a dark side: schools can use predictions to steer students to or away from specific unis as much for their own rep as for the student’s best interest or potential.
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Not that many people take the subject tests and essay, so they don’t make that much money for College Board.
They were also having problems with both of them. The subject tests have not been modified to take in account changing curriculum. The math and science tests are compromised, because College Board won’t bother to write new questions, and many of the past tests are available online.
They changed the essay, presumably because students were following tutors, courses, and books in coming up with canned and preprepared material to use on the old essay. Then they pretty much copied it from an AP exam where you had to analyze a passage. That made it harder to use canned material. However, it wasn’t really appropriate for the SAT.
I was not surprised they ended the subject tests, but surprised it was effective immediately. I wrote a subject test book, which I was working on expanding and marketing. All of a sudden, I had to stop work on it, and concentrate on getting my unpublished ACT and SAT books out. From my point of view it would have been better to have had notice, and I am sure the abrupt change also caused problems for many students.
Doesn’t this shows the effect of grade inflations rather than a lack of correlation?
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Physics 1 is an outlier IMO.
I’d posit it’s because there are kids taking the class who should not be. When the College Board in its infinite wisdom (sarcasm) eliminated AP Physics B and replaced it with AP Physics 1 and 2, many HS’s dropped honors physics, and AP Physics 1 became the intro physics course. As a result, the number of test takers doubled the first year that AP Physics 1 was introduced compared to the previous year’s Physics B exam. Most of them had no previous exposure to physics.
Additionally, AP Physics 1 is more conceptual, where AP Physics B was more plug-n-chug math. That change is fine, but I’m not convinced that the teachers understood this distinction the first couple of years and adapted accordingly. Although now, several years in, the teachers should have made any necessary adjustments.
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Be careful with extrapolating based on your limited experience. There are many colleges that prefer AP scores to DE.
I was wondering if it was effective immediately. I have two subject test guidebooks that I wanted to give away, and I guess no one will want them now. This must have been drastic news for the writers of the test guides!
In 2018, at our Georgetown admissions info session, the Dean of Admissions also said this about Georgetown and the SAT subject tests; that they had found that that was the strongest predictor of success at Georgetown.
Actually, I also worked in higher education for years. And as I said, not all DE is created equally.
I would be interested in seeing their data, although it doesn’t really matter anymore. If that data existed I wonder why they wouldn’t have shared that with other schools and/or CB.
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I’ve always thought the main reason Georgetown wants 3 subject tests is the same as they don’t want to be on the Common App: a measure of the strength of its applicants preference for Georgetown.
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Re: Georgetown saying that SAT subject tests were the strongest predictor of success
That the SAT subject tests are better predictors of college success than the SAT has also been noted at Harvard and UC.
But the SAT has long had the incumbency and mindshare advantage over the SAT subject tests. As noted above by some posters, requiring the SAT subject tests caused some students not to consider the college at all, or increased access issues for first-generation-to-college students with poor HS counselor college advising.
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I wonder how it’ll impact all the test-flexible colleges, which allowed 3 subject tests instead of the SAT or ACT. Some students performed better on those because they don’t try to test speed and ability to figure out their “tricks”, but just straight knowledge, questions getting harder and harder (the Math 2 is significantly harder than SAT Math, for instance - Math 2 is mostly Algebra2/Precalc, whereas SAT Math is about 60% middle school math+Algebra1, and 40% Geometry, Algebra2. The Literature test includes more skills and ability than SAT English. And obviously these tests allow students to show strength in specific subjects.)
Another advantage of SAT Subjects over AP is that they’re offered several times a year and results are immediately available, which allows students to retake or stagger their subjects.
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Other (probably small) groups of students who might have found SAT subject tests important:
- Home schooled students who completed a non-outsourced (e.g. college or well known home school provider) course and want external validation of the grade received.
- Students (probably more likely home schooled, but perhaps including those who for some reason were unable to take an important college prep course in their high schools) who self-educated a non-sequential high school level subject and want to prove knowledge of it to colleges being applied to.
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The way I understand the change, physics 1 + 2 is like physics B spread over two years instead of one year, but without recommending taking high school physics first like physics B did (although some high schools used physics B as the honors physics option without recommending or requiring a previous high school physics course). But the result is that physics 1 is the default honors option in physics, while physics 2 gets only about 1/7 of the students as physics 1. So many students get greater depth, but only half of the material.
Obviously, this resulted in a mismatch with the physics SAT subject test, so that students who completed only physics 1 would have to self-study the remaining physics topics before taking the physics SAT subject test (unlike many other SAT subject tests where doing well in the course is sufficient without needing additional prep). Of course, that is no longer a concern with the cancellation of SAT subject tests.