<p>i got this info from a tweet from the chronicle of higher education dated 2/9/11 i have no idea how to copy the info over here!!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In my experience with teaching AP the test difficulty does not vary much from year to year but perhaps Psychology is different. You can get the actual %'s on AP Central. As far as testing topics the teacher isn’t covering?? College board is very clear on the topics it will be testing on. For AP Psychology:
</p>
<p>So I am having a hard time understanding why the teacher is not teaching the topics they list.</p>
<p>Our local HS encourages every Senior to “try” an AP class (especially AP Lang). Oh and they also eliminated a lot of Honors classes in order to push more students in taking AP. Then they water down the classes so that most kids get an A or B, however the pass rates aren’t very high. The classes which are self selecting such as Calc AB and BC have high pass rates. IMHO, the honors level classes should be restored as an option, students should not be so pushed into AP and the AP classes themselves should be “beefed up” so that the students who take them and do well have a better chance of passing.</p>
<p>you could score a 75% raw on some AP tests and still pull off a 5. </p>
<p>If you’re getting a 3, you’re getting close to half of the questions wrong.</p>
<p>Why would you love a teacher who clearly made the course too hard, given the disconnect between the final grade (low) and AP score (high)?</p>
<p>At our high school I think lots of students get 3 (and often 4 or 5) on AP exam.</p>
<p>I couldn’t get my son to take AP Spanish because his schedule was already loaded he said it was very hard to get over a 3. He told me (and I think it checked out on the web) that 60% of the Spanish AP test takers are native speakers. My D had gotten a 3, with a year of AP Spanish beyond IB where she scored 6 of 7.</p>
<p>this is the exact reason why AP scores should/could be included in the college admissions process:</p>
<p>1) kids can “walk” into AP courses, then either not take the test or get 1’s for just showing up; colleges wouldn’t even know…</p>
<p>2) classes are dumbed down so that majority of the kids get an A or B in the class (regardless of AP test scores)</p>
<p>3)** (my addition) What about the high schools where kids have to jump through hoops to even take ONE AP course, have to take the test, and the large majority of the school gets 3 or higher on ALL tests?? (and no, the grades in the classes are NOT all A’s and B’s)</p>
<p>The colleges are comparing all these kids to each other; counting the # of AP courses offered at schools with what kids take; comparing GPA’s amongst them…when in reality, there is no equity; no equality in how this is all being handled…</p>
<p>AP was “supposedly” designed as a standardized equal program; all of these comments and impressions reflect that those intentions have not been met…</p>
<p>College board is a business; plain and simple…AP program needs reform, but it ain’t gonna happen…</p>
<p>At our HS, the Calc teacher prides himself on teaching so that 95% of the students get a 4 or 5.</p>
<p>The other courses are similar…don’t know the statistics, but the vast majority of the students do very well. Of course, it’s a selected group of serious students. If you don’t do the work over the summer, you can’t be in the class in the fall.</p>
<p>colorado_mom–that may be true, but it doesn’t mean you can’t learn Spanish in 5 years of HS, culminating in the AP level. My D got an 800 on the Spanish SAT II, and a 5 on the AP. Nobody in our family speaks Spanish or is Hispanic.</p>
<p>I agree with Rodney</p>
<p>True story #2. My D thought she just didn’t get AP Calculus. Her strict, demanding teacher said simply “Well, we’ll keep working at it until you do.” D got a B+ in the course, and scored 4 on her AP exam. Love that teacher.</p>
<p>Damn. Just lost a long analysis. I backed out the students with significant home/outside language experience from those with for Chinese, Spanish, and French, and in each case the % of students scoring a 5 was more than twice as high for students with outside experience than for “standard” students, rather consistently across all the languages. What was particularly interesting was that the percentage of students earning 5s varies tremendously between the languages. Only 5.9% of the “Standard” (no outside experience) students earn 5s in French, while 39.7% of the “Standard” group in Chinese earn 5s. Maybe it is all accounted for in selection bias (non-native speakers who choose Chinese are much, much better language students than are non-native speakers who choose French), or perhaps teachers of Chinese are far more accomplished than are teachers of French. But I think that the most likely answer is that the Chinese and French language exams are not similarly leveled, and that the French exam is much tougher than the Chinese exam.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Well, if your concern is more about learning than the grade, then you would want the toughest course available. Our son’s first physics and chem courses were in college - he got As in them. He self-studied university physics when he was 13 and chemistry later on. He self-studied the material because he was interested in it; not because there was a grade at stake. When he got to the real thing, it was much easier as he had seen most of it before.</p>
<p>The AP system appears to be something that schools try to game. The College Board is probably all for it as it benefits in terms of revenues. The students and taxpayers are the losers.</p>
<p>In major metros with significant Chinese populations, there are informal Chinese language schools which typically teach Chinese on weekends from K-8 for very little tuition money. It’s usually expected that there is at least a native speaker at home. Our kids typically spent at least an hour per day on Chinese lessons throughout the week. That’s going to provide quite a leg up compared to those that start in high-school.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Because you’ll LEARN something rather than being spoon-fed what’s on a test. You won’t be blindsided with overconfidence when you get to college and find out AP provided are bare bones introduction. S1’s “Calc BC” course finished the AP curriculum in December. AP Stat was calculus-based and one semester, Comp Sci AB (back when it was offered) was also one semester and went way past the AP curriculum. His program considered the AP standards the bare-bones minimum. This made HS Multivariable and DiffEq truly challenging courses because the teacher taught it at the college math major level. </p>
<p>So yea, there were folks who got Bs or Cs and 5s. And breezed through subsequent levels in college. </p>
<p>Both my kids got 5 on AP Stat. They were at different high schools, and I can tell you there was no comparison between what S1 learned in Stat (calc-based, one semester) vs. what S2 did (full year AP Stat, hewed to the curriculum).</p>
<p>My daughter recently mentioned she’d had had a C in BC calculus on her final senior year report card - I guess I never noticed it, probably didn’t even open the report card. The teacher’s policy was to raise your grade one grade if you scored a 5 on the AP test, so it’s a B her high school transcript - should anyone ever look at her high school transcript. Everyone in the class scored a 5. Good teacher, good kids. It was a hard class. :)</p>
<p>I wonder why so many high schools are letting students that are not ready to take college level courses take AP classes. One of my kids took 9 AP’s and got 4’s and 5’s on all. The other two are taking no AP’s because they are not ready to take college level classes yet. They will be ready next year when they are in college. There is a problem with the system that allows so many kids to take college level classes when they cannot pass the exams.</p>
<p>At our kids’ elite private HS, nearly all the kids get a 4s or 5s, so it varies widely as to quality at different schools. Even the kids who get Bs or lower in the actually AP course get 4s & 5s in the exams, so they are learning whatever the test material is expected well enough.</p>
<p>I took AP US History and had a 95 average going into finals. I scored a 98 on the New York State Regents but my AP was only a 3.</p>
<p>Rodney, students can post their AP exam scores in the “honors” section of the Common App. Leaving the scores out is pretty much a signal that you bombed the test or didn’t take it. I would assume that admissions readers realize this.</p>