Eight elite private high schools in the Washington DC area announced they are dropping out of the Advanced Placement program:
Agree that this is a wise & appropriate move for highly selective private schools, and could also be a good move for selective magnet schools. However, for most publics & non-highly selective privates, the assimilation & memorization of material demanded by AP courses is probably better.
Most high schools do not have the resources to create their own advanced courses and curricula for their most advanced students, nor do they have the connections with and preferences from colleges to have such courses recognized by colleges for advanced placement (or even as the most rigorous courses in a college admissions context – if you saw a non-AP calculus course on a non-elite high school record, would you assume that it is more or less rigorous course than an AP calculus course?). Hence it is easier for most high schools to use AP or one of a few other well known programs (e.g. IB) for advanced courses and curricula for their most advanced students.
The elite high schools are probably doing this because AP has spread much further than its origins, which was for elite high schools to have their advanced courses recognized by colleges for advanced placement in a standardized way. Now that AP is widespread, elite high schools feel that they need to distinguish themselves as offering “better than AP” courses.
As the article shares: By dropping AP courses teachers can develop in depth courses to promote “critical thinking and rigorous analysis” over AP"s focus on “speed of assimilation and memorization.”
This doesn’t require funding so much as it does motivated, inquisitive & intelligent students.
Bravo! I wish our public high school would do this. I get so angry when I see how history is taught in AP classes. Why treat a fascinating subject as prep for a trivia contest? I was a history major at an Ivy league university and no history course was ever taught that way. Watching my daughter slog through AP world made me want to cry.
I don’t see this as a problem for college admissions. As long as the GC checks the box for “highest” rigor, it shouldn’t matter that they are honors classes and not “AP” classes.
@ucbalumnus “The elite high schools are probably doing this because AP has spread much further than its origins, which was for elite high schools to have their advanced courses recognized by colleges for advanced placement in a standardized way.”
I’m not so sure about this statement that APs were designed for elite high schools. When I was in HS in the 1980’s, our average, typical public school had at least 6 AP classes to choose from. AP classes have been around since the 1950’s and btw I/B classes introduced in the US in the early 1970’s.
However, I don’t disagree with you that the private elite high schools are trying to separate themselves from other high schools which makes them still relevant and sought after by high-performing students and their families (i.e they need to ustify that 30-50K a year tuition!)
Our public HS did this quite some time ago. No problems.
My kid’s independent private school intentionally had very limited AP offerings & only for seniors. 2 foreign languages, Calc AB, and stats were it. They had their own honors courses for other subjects. It was mostly fine (they didn’t have honors courses in one area that my kids wanted).
APS were fine when kids could actually use them as college credits ( and reduce the cost of college). Now that some colleges have restricted that option, it doesn’t make much sense to get kids to do tons of extra memorization (note specifically not learning) just so they can check off the box for hardest courses.
Great schools often have already figured this out. This has also driven lots of strong students from strong public schools into private schools where they can appreciate learning rather than be driven by data sets. AP seem to be needed in lower level schools and need to be discarded in strong schools. Someone should be looking at the reasons.
Many students at these schools take multiple AP tests in May regardless of whether their classes are designated as AP on their transcript. In fact, many students take AP tests in subjects that they have not taken in school at all. This “new” policy does nothing to relieve the stress of students who feel like they still need to have good AP scores for college admissions. Now they will be taking classes that are even more rigorous than the standard AP class and then studying additionally on their own to score well on the AP test. This would really be news only if these schools actively discouraged students from taking AP tests and encouraged them to just learn for the sake of learning. This is a terrible mixed message when schools continue to facilitate AP testing while rejecting classes that specifically prepare student to take the AP tests.
I don’t see where the article states that students will still be encouraged to prepare for and take AP tests. Every talk I have attended or seen given by admissions officers of elite schools has stated that they do not want kids studying for extra AP tests. The problem is that no matter how many times schools say this, kids don’t believe it. They feel pressure or their parents pressure them to rack up more scores. I have yet to see any evidence that those extra scores help any student gain admission. In fact, it may actually hurt a students chances as the colleges will view it as evidence of being a grind rather than following one’s passions.
Scarsdale (in Westchester County, NY), dropped AP classes about 10 years ago. As did most NYC elite privates. My kids go to a HS in the same category as Scarsdale. I wish the district would drop AP.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/education/07advanced.html
not even sure what to say about this; but education in the US is more and more marginalized and income driven.
if our urban HS - in a district with 70% low income kids - dropped AP classes, the top students wouldnt have many good choices; teachers certainly wouldn’t be making elite courses on their own. AP classes help out our kids with college credit possibilities and are a source of pride for many. Our kids here aren’t above taking the classes; we are thankful for those choices. it’s slightly a downer when others say AP isnt a high enough standard when there are no other options.
The surprise to me is that those schools have been offering AP courses until now. The equivalent schools with which I am familiar elsewhere never began offering AP courses, for exactly the reasons given in the article.
Most of the equivalent schools used to offer them. The AP program has been around for more than 60 years after all. However, many of these schools have dropped the AP designation over time in at least some disciplines. That said, these schools still offer courses at the equivalent rigor, and their students still end up taking AP tests.
Choate no longer offers an AP curriculum, but any student can sit for any AP exam they wish. Years ago, Choate felt pressured by parents to offer an AP curriculum even though those courses were never the most rigorous available. Taking “all APs” would have meant choosing the substandard courses and would not check the “most rigorous” box in any subject. During our son’s time there, the new headmaster began the campaign to educate parents as to why an AP curriculum was not necessary at most of the New England boarding schools as these are the schools the APs were developed, in part, to measure against. The AP program wasted school resources, and more than one teacher indicated to us that it was the ones who drew the short straw who had to teach them. No one benefited from teaching or taking a teach-to-the-test course at a school whose education mission is the opposite of that.
I hope this trend takes hold at every school where the AP curriculum is not the best the school has to offer.
It isn’t relevant to most college applicants, but for those students who want to attend University of Cambridge, scores of 5 on 5 AP exams are a required component of a student’s application. Similarly, applicants to Oxford are expected to submit at least 3 AP scores of 5 as well as SAT Subject test scores, as required components of their applications. The students I know that attended private school and applied to either Cambridge or Oxford had to study for the AP exams on their own, in addition to shouldering an extremely rigorous academic schedule.
I think “self-study” for AP exams is also a common practice among students who attend public high schools where there are either few honors or AP courses, and those students want to qualify for merit, financial aid, or receive future course credit in public and even private universities. So they study on their own for these tests, even though they are expensive to take, because, like the SAT or ACT, the AP results standardize the students’ academic achievements relative to their cohort of college applicants.
Small and well known private schools have intimate long teem relationships with elite schools, its a totally different ball game compared to big public schools. They can drop AP and increase/decrease rigor without any consequences. It would be easier for college adcoms to accept their full pay students based on GPA even if their SAT or AP scores suck.
I’ve been around for more than 60 years, too. Until I was in my mid-20s my mother was a teacher and department chair at well-regarded private high schools, so I had a more-or-less constant awareness of hot curricular issues. The school I went to offered exactly two courses with the AP label – what are now called AP French Literature and AP Spanish Literature. Those were the only courses that followed the AP curriculum. Of course, some other courses did a perfectly good job preparing people for AP tests. I think pretty much everyone in my Calculus class took the Calculus AP test (I don’t remember AB or BC designations back then), but we were all seniors, so it didn’t have anything to do with college applications. Our other lab sciences were quite rigorous, but I never heard of anyone taking the AP tests back then. My US History course would not have prepared anyone for the AP. It was one of the best courses I ever took anywhere, but it involved very little date-and-event memorization. It focused on how different intellectual movements in the study of history had interpreted the same periods, employing some of the same evidence and sometimes different sorts of evidence. We had learned dates and names in 5th grade and 8th grade.
I spent a year in a program run by some famous boarding schools, and mostly attended by students from those and similar schools. No APs. At the time, no one seemed to think there should be some.
The respected private school my kids attended 15-25 years ago claimed never to have “surrendered our curriculum” to AP. Kids there did often take AP math and science tests, and maybe foreign language, but nothing else. The math curriculum for the best students was thought to be particularly un-AP-friendly, although most of them took the test for course placement purposes. At the time, I certainly thought this school’s closest competitors for highly academic students had the same contempt for AP, although I knew some of the “lesser” private schools did offer AP courses. (The public school to which my kids later moved was moderately AP-crazy. Most top students graduated with 8 or 9 AP courses. Even there, though, the faculty and administration were unhappy with AP, and were putting a lot of effort into investigating the IB curriculum and trying it out.)
Of course, there was a gap of about 20 years between my high school education / my mother’s involvement with high school education and when I got familiar with what my kids’ school was doing. It’s entirely possible that schools like the ones I described joined the AP camp and then left it again during that period. But they weren’t there in, say 1980, and it looked like they weren’t there in 2000, either.
I completely agree that AP classes are valuable in many school systems, but when well-resourced schools have the option of designing a more flexible curriculum that can focus on challenging students to learn rather than “teaching to the test” I applaud them. I remain concerned, however, that this is just lip service. Without clear guidance to the contrary, students will still feel compelled to prepare for and take AP tests regardless of this policy statement. A Washington Post article on the subject interviewed the head of one of the signatory schools who noted "that students will remain free to take AP tests regardless of whether they take AP courses. He cited English classes as an example. “We do not offer an AP English course here,” he said, “and many of our students have taken the AP English test and done well.” The Washington Post article explains that the schools surveyed 150 colleges and were told that the lack of APs would not hurt their students in college admissions, but again, without clear communication to students this is unlikely to have any impact. One of the 8 signatory schools has never had AP classes, yet its curriculum guide still states that the school “recognizes that colleges and universities may utilize AP exam results to determine placement, especially in math, science, and languages. Students in some advanced classes opt to take an AP exam upon successful completion of a specific course. Others sit for AP exams for which coursework has equipped but not explicitly prepared them.”