<p>My S is currently taking AP Chem. His teacher gave only 2-3 "A"s for the class. I heard that another AP teacher will change a B to an A for any student who gets a 5 on the AP test. I was wondering if this is a common practice. My S took 2 AP subjects last year and got 5s.</p>
<p>I don't think it's a common practice - for one thing, the AP scores are sent to students in July, long after the end of the school year.</p>
<p>It certainly isn't done at either of the schools my kids attended.</p>
<p>My son got a B+ his first semester of an AP science and ended up with a 5 on the AP test at the end of the year. No one changed his grade.</p>
<p>Our school gives a profile which shows the distribution of As, Bs, etc. by AP class, and this class is famous for maybe 1 A, the rest Bs and Cs. Yet everyone makes 5's. </p>
<p>At our school, the sciences and maths are pretty difficult to ace, yet their AP success rate is astonishingly high (All 5's, maybe ONE 4). The Englishes and Humanities, on the other hand, are about evenly distributed with As and Bs for everyone, yet their AP scores are all over the board, with only about a 60-70% pass rate. I would think a college would see this and figure it out.</p>
<p>In the long run, it's much better to have taken a more rigorous class gradewise, if it prepares you better for college.</p>
<p>I've never heard of that either.</p>
<p>Not done at my kids school.</p>
<p>Each high school can set its own rules. Each college can too about what to do with AP test scores or high school grades from an AP-designated course. The College Board does validation studies once in a while by giving college students AP tests to see how well an AP test score at a given level correlates with college grades, but there is never an exact match, because college courses themselves differ.</p>
<p>My daughter and son had long graduated from high school by the time they got their AP test scores. Final transcripts had been issued, and the colleges had them. No grade changes here either.</p>
<p>The standard equivalence is
5=A
4=B
3=c</p>
<p>However, how a student performs on the test may not correlate with the student's performance in class, especially as the latter grade may include such factors as on-time return of homework, how well the homework is done, class attendance, overall behavior, etc... as well as performance on in-class tests and quizzes.
Some schools take the AP score into account when grading, but most, to my knowledge, do not since AP scores come out in July.</p>
<p>This is not done at my son's school either, but I'm sure many students wish it were. The AP Lit teacher has awarded only one A in recent years. At a get-together with parents at the beginning of the year, the teacher bragged that students scored 5 on the AP test at a much higher rate than the national average, but I don't remember the numbers.</p>
<p>If you take the AP exam, you do not have to take the final. The kids pay the AP fee themselves. So, basically, it will cost you $83 to avoid the final. Your grade is calculated without a final in that case. If you are not happy with your end-of-semester grade, you can voluntarily take the final, hoping to raise the grade.</p>
<p>Our area HS graduations are May 17-21 so the AP exams can run right into them!</p>
<p>Don't know if it is still done, but at S's HS a 4 = A, and often a 3 = B. Grades were retroactively changed.</p>
<p>"Don't know if it is still done, but at S's HS a 4 = A, and often a 3 = B. Grades were retroactively changed."</p>
<p>WOW. That's pretty generous. If a student gets a 4 on the AP test, his grade is retroactively changed to an A???</p>
<p>I guess it goes to show that there really isn't any way to compare GPAs across schools. And people want to do away with standardized testing?</p>
<p>In my AP Chem class, the teacher tried to motivate this one student to study by saying if she got a 5, she would give her an A. This kind of stuff doesn't happen very often though.</p>
<p>MaryTN:</p>
<p>That may be true of your school, but definitely a standard practice. At our school, all students MUST take the finals. They are urged to but not required to take the AP test. Finals are scheduled for seniors right after the AP tests and graduation is in early June. For juniors, finals are scheduled in mid-June.</p>
<p>It probably compensates a little for the fact that there is no grade weighting at the school for honors or AP classes. A B in AP Calc is the same as a B in auto repair.</p>
<p>We don't have grade weighting at our school, either, but there's no retrospective adjustment of grades to reflect performance on the AP test. </p>
<p>Interesting that this comes up with the AP. What about SAT IIs?</p>
<p>The only teacher at my school who made that offer was the Psychology teacher...and that was only for a 7 on the IB SL test, not for a 5 on the AP, which we also took, but is much easier to attain (contrary to many subjects...in my experience, the difficulty of APs is generally between that of SL and HL IB, but Psych is definitely an exception.)</p>
<p>Our son got a 5 on his CalcBC AP exam and an 83(B-?) for his final grade. He did retake Calc 2 his freshman year in college, racking up another B. Oops!</p>
<p>No, his hs transcript was not changed and the AP exam grade did not equate to an A in either hs or college.</p>
<p>My son took the AP Chemistry exam as a junior last May. His AP Chemistry teacher's long standing rule was that no matter what grade a student earned in his class by the end of the year (three trimesters including final exams) he would amend the student's transcript grade to an 'A' if they got a 5 on the AP exam and a 'B+' if they got a 4. My son got a 5 on the exam. Sometime in August, my son got a revised report card sent to him showing an 'A' grade as his final grade. His transcript that went to colleges shows only the 'A' also. Now, in his case, he had earned a year end grade of 'A-' anyway so it was a small bump up for him. But, there actually was boy in his class who had a year end grade of 'D' and he pulled off a 5 on the AP exam and ended up with an 'A' on his transcript. I have mixed feelings about this system as I think colleges deserve to see the actual grade earned over the course of a year. </p>
<p>My son is taking AP Physics and AP Calculus BC now and his current teachers do not use this grade-change rule. So it is not a school wide thing, just up to the teacher.</p>