<p>I wanted to mention that MD also has many IB programs and we have jump start which allows kids to take classes at the CC for a reduce rate. So we do have many choices for advance classes. So not everyone is putting their money into just AP courses or tests. </p>
<p>I am sure there are more of a concentration of AP test takers in central MD, but we are using averages here for all 23 counties and our abysmal Baltimore City. Our state also has a high percentage of URM, so there is a concentrated area of students that pull up the state pass rates on AP tests.</p>
West Virginia parent here! We live in Charleston, the capital and most populous city. S1 went out of district to Kanawha County’s magnet school for AP/Honors. It offers 19 AP classes, the highest in the state. He was an AP Scholar with Honor and entered college with 28 hours credit. He took 5 AP classes, challenged a sixth test and ended up with a second major in History mostly on AP credit. But, as the disclaimer says, “results not typical.”
S2 goes in district to the magnet school for the performing arts. I’m not entirely sure how much AP they offer, since S2 hasn’t taken any. But I have noticed that among the “AP Honor Roll” student photos posted outside the office, there are only two African-American girls and no A-A boys, and this school is the most racially diverse in the entire state.
All high schools are required to offer 4 AP classes, but when you have one small high school to serve a single, impoverished county and the dropout, teen pregnancy and unemployments are astronomical, AP is the least of your worries.</p>
That it is, and you see a lot of this in our rural areas - academically gifted kids whose families do not value education and whose schools are so busy trying to put out fires that they can’t serve them properly. And many of those who do finish college don’t want to leave their rural areas to work and spend their lives underemployed. It’s sad.</p>
<p>I think that part of what is going on in rural, comparatively poor states like VT and ME is that there is a concentration of population–end educated population-- in certain areas of the state. Maine, for example, has only about 1.2 million people in the state, but fully 1/3 of those live in the greater Portland area. (I’d guess that Burlington represents something similar in VT, as well as the Bennington area.) Those are also the areas with the highest concentration of well-educated adults and the highest concentration of “knowledge worker” jobs. The HSs in those areas probably offer a good range of APs, in contrast to the very far-flung rural ones.</p>
<p>I think this is mostly a report card on where the College Board has been most successful in marketing the AP curriculum and has achieved the most market penetration. It would be a bad mistake, in my opinion, to read it as an indicator of educational excellence or deficiency. APs can be part of a strong HS curriculum, but they are by no means the only way to go about it.</p>
<p>Our local public HS offers an extensive IB curriculum but no APs. Their AP pass rate is approximately zero; kids don’t pass AP exams because they don’t take AP exams or AP courses, except perhaps the occasional kid self-studying for one or more AP tests, but those are few. Yet the graduates of that IB program regularly go on to some of the top colleges and universities in the country.</p>
<p>My daughters have homeschooled right through HS, which as freshmen and sophomores meant they took some rigorous IB and pre-IB classes a la carte at our local HS while also doing equally rigorous work in other venues–but no APs. As HS juniors and seniors, they’ve taken most of their classes at our public flagship university–not community college, not dual enrollment, just regular, university-level work which they’ve excelled in, competing against regular college students, some of them 4 or 5 years older than our daughters. Typically they’ve taken a full load of college courses while supplementing that with one or two additional self-studied “classes.” We’ve counted those college classes as part of their HS curriculum, really the central part in their junior and senior years. Not a single AP class or AP test between them, which means our little homeschool has an AP pass rate of zero, but I’d put our curriculum up against the best of them. We just never saw a reason to go out of our way to get them into HS classes that purport to be the “equivalent” of college classes (they’re not equivalent in my view, but that’s another story) when they could be taking actual college classes, which in our experience has left them much better prepared for the pace, independence, self-motivation, and time management skills that you need to succeed in college.</p>
<p>Hmmm, AP credit might give at most 3-4 semesters’ worth of freshman-level history courses, if the history ones are even accepted for subject credit. How is that most of a history major when a typical history major requires 8 or more semesters of upper division history courses in additional the freshman-level introductory courses?</p>
<p>Re AP Chinese - the test is pretty meaningless. All 3 of my kids’ colleges did not accept the AP for placement - they had to take a placement test at the school to determine their level.</p>
<p>Seems like a lot of colleges use their own placement testing for foreign language placement, regardless of whether the student brings in standardized test scores for that language. Presumably, this may because the student’s actual language ability may be higher than the test score indicates (if the student has learned more language than the test covers, or got a maximum score because his/her ability is beyond what is tested) or lower than the test score indicates (if the student took the test in junior year but has not used the language since). That may also be to handle placement of students with high school language but no standardized testing, or heritage speakers with no high school course work or standardized testing at all.</p>
<p>@ucb - his other major is also in the liberal arts and shares all the same core requirements, so most of his classes are for both majors and all his so-called electives are taken in History. He’s actualluy finishing up his history major this semester and will finish his other - sports broadcasting - next spring.</p>