…and really committed, talented teachers. Here in central FL, it has been my experience that many public HS AP classes are taught by less than AP qualified teachers. Hard to be competitive on the AP test when you don’t have the best teachers. S went to a small public charter that only had 9 AP classes, but were taught by excellent teachers. D goes to traditional public with over 20 APs and has, I feel, poor teaching in most subjects (she goes because it’s an performing arts magnet - but the rest of the school is very low end in terms of grades,e tc.). The AP test is the AP test, but mastery of subject matter has a lot to do with the teacher and the student.
While this criticism is commonly said as if it were inherent in AP courses, does it actually make sense generally?
Many AP courses are commonly year-long high school courses that cover the material that is commonly covered in a semester in college. So the high school AP course should have more time to go deeper into the subject or cover more topics at the same depth than the college course. So if they are only going “an inch deep”, that may be due to general low teaching quality, not something inherent in AP courses.
“Offers AP courses: Branson, Castilleja, College Prep, Harker, Head Royce, Menlo, San Francisco University”
Not really sure why you felt the need to post this, but if you know these schools and delve deeper you’ll see that they have carefully chosen those APs that allow them to create their own curriculum while still calling the class AP. And it’s the science APs that were dropped first. Note I already stated this, and said that they have continued to offer “AP Calc” since it’s still just Calc and doesn’t limit what they teach. They will offer AP Lang and Eng since it doesn’t change the way they teach them, too. The number of APs that the students at several of these schools take is smaller than at the local publics and the classes are not geared towards the tests. I could go on, but don’t feel the need to argue this point. When we were looking at HS, we noticed that the top privates were intentionally offering fewer APs across the board.
AP exams have an important role beyond college admission. At the private college DD17 attends, class standing and priority for registration is determined by credit hours, including AP courses. That is also true at many public colleges. Few AP courses can mean last to register.
Not necessarily; often it’s the AP curriculum. While AP courses are often considered to be equivalent to a college course, in many cases it’s just not the case, IMO. Certainly calc 1 is (more or less) calc 1, no matter which way you slice it, that’s not always the case with a discipline like history. While some elite colleges may offer a “race through the ages” survey of US/Euro/World history, many others do not offer such surveys and prefer to offer courses that cover a tighter time frame in greater depth.
"…and really committed, talented teachers. Here in central FL, it has been my experience that many public HS AP classes are taught by less than AP qualified teachers. Hard to be competitive on the AP test when you don’t have the best teachers. "
Same issue in SW Florida. I’ve had my kids in both private and public schools for different years and this is one place the private schools have a huge advantage - they can and do fire ineffective teachers. In our area, similar to most public schools, the union system makes it close to impossible to fire teachers who have committed a serious offense, much less those that are merely ineffective. We had a case not too long ago where a teacher was caught hitting special ed students and convicted for it, but still couldn’t be fired, just reassigned to a position where she wasn’t in direct contact with students. So you can imagine there’s not much will or ability to address comparatively “minor” issues like mediocre teaching.
There are some wonderful, talented teachers at my sons’ current school teaching AP classes. There are also some teachers who are not skilled “teaching” AP classes; that’s not going to change any time soon. Until the public schools are able to address the issue of varying levels of quality teaching (highly unlikely given the union system), I suspect it will be a struggle to rely on teachers implementing their own, customized curriculum that is more comprehensive than the AP curriculum. The AP classes may not be the be-all-end-all, but they offer a standard curriculum that even most unionized schools are able to implement, regardless of the quality of the teacher.
I am familiar with some of these schools. The ones I know offer fewer APs than the nearby public schools and they are selective in what they offer. They also offer advanced coursework that far exceeds the AP curriculum and there are plenty of students who elect to pursue those rigorous classes in lieu of another AP class. AP Bio? You’re not going to find it. Same with AP World History or Human Geography or Environmental Science.
Our public high school social studies department has three teachers with phds. I suppose this is due to the fact that college jobs aren’t plentiful for all the social studies phds. The teaching has been excellent and I have never felt they just teach to the test. My kids really enjoyed the classroom discussions and lectures. The older kid took and the younger kid plans to take a full 4 years of AP social studies.
I took four APs back in 1973 when I was a senior in high school. AP Art was one of the best courses I’ve ever taken and gave me a big jump on my eventual major. AP Euro, did involve a certain amount of memorization, but I feel that’s okay for a first intro overview of the field. We still wrote lots of essays. AP Calc was pretty straight forward. We just took whatever senior English we were interested in and then took the exam - there might have been a week or so of familiarization with the exam format.
My kids went to a public high school with a lot of APs. I had no problem with any of them. The AP Euro teacher was fabulous - well known for teaching kids to write. He had a Phd in Art History and one of his little additions to the curriculum was teaching them to look at a painting with the eyes of an historian.
I think there are serious problems with how AP courses are administered and dealt with by high schools which have little to do with the tests. One is the growth of “AP Lite” and the fact that so many high schools weigh APs in determining class rank. This has distorted how kids choose high school courses.
If your kid has a real interest in environmental science, then there’s certainly nothing wrong with him/her choosing to take it in high school. However, if your kid is “into” history and is already a master of one foreign language, it would probably make more sense for him/her to take a second foreign language. But if all APs are weighted more than “regular” courses, (s)he will most likely take AP Environmental Science or AP Psych instead because of the weighting policy.
In fact years ago, I was asked by a dad if his son should take the rare opportunity the son had been given to take some classes at the state flagship U in philosophy. The principal called him in and told him that if he did so, he would not be val or sal because the high school would not weight his college courses and there’s no AP test in philosophy. I told him there’s no selective college that wouldn’t be more impressed by a kid who did well in a regular college course with college students as classmates than with an A in an AP lite class. They’d also be impressed if they knew the kid made that choice despite the “hit” to his GPA. So, the kid took the college course and ended up with a lower class ranking. He did get a sympathetic GC to explain that college courses were not given extra weight in GPA calculations and the val and sal had edged him out because they had take an AP class rather than a college course.
I’ve even known of some high schools where kids who took lots of APs and no “extras” like music or art had higher GPAs than those who had the same # of APs and did not take any “extras.” That’s idiotic IMO.
One small data point - the new private HS being created in Greenwich (the extension of Greenwich Country Day) will not be offering AP classes.
@socaldad2002 Less than 7,000 high schools even participated in the AP program in 1985. So at least in terms of AP participation, your high school must have been significantly above average.
@warbrain “Less than 7,000 high schools even participated in the AP program in 1985. So at least in terms of AP participation, your high school must have been significantly above average.”
I wouldn’t consider 7,000 high schools as being elite. Maybe a few hundred?
I’m not sure what “delve deeper” means to these schools. What do they need?
Who is deciding what’s important? At least the AP curriculum has guidelines.
Is that “delving deeper” into specific points of history that the teacher loves (rather than the broad view) or “delving deeper” into how different paths crossed in time to create a particular scenario (analyzing a scenario)?
A well taught AP course can do both with the proper teacher. If not a great teacher, hopefully you end up with at least an overview of history. With a great teacher, you get the overview with focused highlights and an ability to start analyzing scenarios with some “what if’s” thrown in. And some writing ability.
My DIL has taught AP American and AP Euro for the past few years. Glad I never had her! She’s TOUGH (but well loved!) (She’s now starting work on her PHD).
Her classes consistently passed the tests with 4’s and 5’s. One of her major complaints was that the timing of the AP tests vs the specific school schedule cut short her over all teaching time. The test was always about two weeks prior the end of the regular grading period for the school. There was never any downtime because of it.
They’d take the exams and then she had to figure out what to do with students who “were done” with the class for two weeks.
And this is a terrible policy. The order of registration should be determined by number of credits earned at that college or as transfer credits from another college, not including dual enrollment. For many reasons. Chief among them is that not every HS offers AP classes, or offers only a few. Those students should be penalized at registration time? Also, it becomes a pay-for-play situation. Remember, it costs MONEY to take AP exams, and a lot of money to take a lot of AP exams. Further, at many colleges that charge higher tuition for upper-class standing (junior and senior), students with a zillion AP credits are reaching junior status a year early and paying for it. The student who perhaps TOOK the AP classes in HS but chooses not to take the college credits because it will cost $2k to earn advanced standing a semester early, is penalized at registration.
A higher class standing due to AP credit may not necessarily be advantageous, because a college may reserve space in introductory level courses for frosh students who need them as prerequisites for their majors.
Also, some colleges charge higher tuition for those with higher class standing (AP credit included), so it can be disadvantageous to have lots of AP credit if one does not want to use it to graduate early.
However, most high school students choosing whether or not to take AP courses and tests do not yet know which college they will attend, so they will not be able to plan based on the specific college’s policies on AP credit.
For my kids who planned/plan to apply to at least some UK colleges several AP’s are a must.
It’s unfortunate what the AP system has become. When it started, it was a fantastic opportunity for the very top students that had maxed out their high School courses to get some extra challenge and some college credit to boot. I have fond memories of the 3 classes I took (which were the only 3 offered.) My daughters experience was over-packed classes with, much weaker students and a ridiculous amount of repetition and hand-holding through the material. My goodness, they had to rewrite their notebooks that were then graded lol. We moved her into a duel enrollment program where she could take almost all her classes at a real college in real college time with college students. We opted to put middle in a project based school that doesn’t offer AP on principle. He was given the opportunity for duel enrollment at a local university. Perfect. Neither had trouble getting into good colleges.
I have no doubt there are some fantastic AP teachers. I have no doubt there are schools “doing it right.” I think it’s just gotten too big and warped to stay true to it’s original intentions.
There aren’t a lot of AP classes in our high school and they truly are the only classes that will give the kids enough rigor to prepare them for college. Regular classes just don’t do that.
Most of the AP teachers are very well liked and very good at engaging their students in the class. Although the school stopped supplementing the AP exams and only a handful took them.
Interesting commentary from Inside Higher Ed:
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/noteworthy