Great post Keasbey. You raise some very insightful points. As you say, it’s not just a matter of credit/no credit, but of whether the credit will count toward your major or graduate school prerequisites. But even then, some may find AP’s helpful for placement irrespective of credits so that is another factor. Still others really don’t care either way because they intend to start with the beginning of the Physics track irrespective of whether their college would have let them skip it. I remember taking the “Chem 101” class as a freshman. It seemed the vast majority (even way back when) had taken AP Chem in high school. Having only taken honors chem (AP Chem wasn’t offered at my high school) I felt at a distinct disadvantage.
I think the basic premise of the AP program – taking college-level classes in high school to save you money and/or time in college – doesn’t really work that well when it comes to the sciences. This is particularly true as it applies to Physics because of the algebra/calculus dichotomy. It’s hard to do college level physics without calculus and most high school students don’t take calculus until their senior year.
So that takes us back to a couple of more fundamental questions - 1) what is the optimal science curriculum/progression for a top high school student (whether they intend to pursue a STEM major in college or not), and 2) how do we want Physics to fit into that? It’s hard to really figure that out (and may be worth a separate thread).
In this case it appears the College Board assumed most students took the honors (or intro) physics to Physics B track. They wanted those students to spend those same two years simply studying the Physics B material in more depth. But it also appears, for whatever reasons, many students took Physics 1 who were not prepared to do so.
And to respond to RandyButternub’s post, while most of the sciences have fairly high failure rates, Physics 1 was historically high this year. You also have to consider the change in passing rates from Physics B. Looking at the numbers from 2013 (which are in the AP Report to the Nation), the Physics B failure rate was only 40%. A sudden jump to 63% is a huge increase. Further, with Physics B only about 27 thousand students failed in 2013. But with Physics 1 you not only had the percentage increase but twice as many people taking the test, so probably over 85 thousand students failed. That’s 60 thousand more kids who have now been given the false impression that they will never be cut out for the more advanced sciences. (The mean grade also dropped from 2.84 with Physics B to 2.25 with Physics 1.) Physics B used to be one of the AP sciences for which students were most prepared. Physics 1 is now by far the science for which students are least prepared. Whatever the College Board’s goals for the revamp included, I can’t imagine that was one of them.