Wow, that blog post you linked to @skieurope seems to be praising the College Board for having increased the number of students who were able to pass the AP Physics test by 5900 this year.
I don’t accept that merely passing more students should be the goal of the AP program. I assume we want a healthy number of students who can demonstrate mastery (or near mastery) of the material. If a significant percentage of students cannot master the material in the high school setting, then we should leave it to actual college professors to teach it. In this case, the number of students getting a 4 or 5 went DOWN by over 3,000 despite an 82% increase in total test takers. A 3 on an AP Exam is the equivalent to a B- to C grade in college. It seems least 20% of students enrolled in a college class should be able to do better than that, right? (As an aside, the new AP Capstone seminar, which the College Board is strangely touting as a success, has a similar problem in that only 16.5% got at least a 4. But I’ll leave a discussion of that for another day.)
In any event, to make may point clear, let’s compare the total numbers from the last two years:
Physics B (2014) 4/5: 32,075 - 3: 24,753
Physics 1 (2015) 4/5: 28,730 - 3: 34,000
So yes, we increased the total number of students who were able to demonstrate that they were able to perhaps eek out a C in a college-level course, but comparatively few students are mastering this material now.
And consider the actual costs of gaining those 5900 Physics students who proved they could at least eek out a C:
According to @skieurope’s link, 76,000 additional students took AP Physics 1 this year. Assuming each class, on average, had 20 students take the test, that would have required schools to add about 3,800 new AP Physics classes this year (not counting AP Physics B classes converted to Physics 1).
According to the College Board it can cost $10,000 to start a new AP science course in a high school (ignoring teacher salaries and overhead). So starting all those new Physics 1 classes to cover the 76,000 additional test takers this year would have cost about $38 million. That breaks down to more than $6,400 PER ADDITIONAL STUDENT who was able to pass the exam this year vs last. For that same money, you could have paid for about 25 credits worth of classes at a state university for each of those fab 5,900. And again, that is not even accounting for teacher salaries and overhead.
Looking at it another way, the pass rate for all the ADDITIONAL students who took AP Physics 1 this year (vs. B), was only 7.7%. At 7.7%, you are talking about maybe 1 or 2 kids in each of the added Physics 1 classes who were able to meet the goal being set for them of demonstrating their ability to get at least a C in a college-level algebra-based Physics class.
Now you might say that this is just a hard class/test and that is a good thing because AP classes should be challenging. And, in fact, this all might be tolerable if the College Board had implemented a new way to teach algebra-based Physics that better aligns with the college curriculum. But it appears the exact opposite is true. As noted before, top college Physics departments (including Stanford, Harvard and now, apparently, Princeton) have decided to grant no credit or advanced standing for Physics 1/2, even though they historically had allowed it for Physics B.
In my view, the College Board officially went over the line here. It is one thing to simply offer high schools a prepackaged curriculum that they can either offer their students or not. It is quite another to tell them that they should cut non-AP classes from their offerings (in this case honors physics). This clearly has harmed our schools and our students and I think the College Board should be taken to task for it.