<p>In S’s English AP class, the teacher said at back-to-school night that taking the exam was not an option. ALL students had to take it in May, as per the (is it the College Board’s?) rules. </p>
<p>I wonder why it is an option in some schools and not others.</p>
<p>My D was told by GC that taking an AP class without taking the exam was a blot on a student’s record. Don’t know how true that is. </p>
<p>But it seems to me that anyone trying to take 6 college level courses SHOULD be up all night. At college, you’d be taking 4 courses a semester, not 6. And you’d be expected to do substantial reading and writing for each. So how can a younger person do 150% of the work of an ordinary college student and still have any life?</p>
<p>i just know that in our school that most kids don’t do exams…then again…they are kinda expensive (86/pop) and alot of kids can’t afford that</p>
<p>Gwen,
Again depends on the kid. D’s taking 6 classes at college, working towards a chemical engineering degree. She came in with 45 hours of AP credit (not all she has, but all she’s allowed to count). At the end of her freshman year she’ll have completed all her pre-engineering requirements. She’s also heavily involved in her sorority and campus crusade. She has a great work ethic and is very disciplined in time managment to go along with, obviously, some grey matter. She got all A’s and and A- her first semester and the only thing she’s stressed over is a silly cover letter/resume she has to have written for a tech writing for engineer class because it’s going to be peer reviewed. I think parents have to know their kids and kids have to know what they are capable of … to a certain degree. For some kids taking lots of AP’s is suicidal … for others, not a blip on the radar screen. But schools have to quit marshalling all students thru the same route … one size fits all strategy. I remember talking to an admission’s advisor for UF (quite competitive to get into in our state) about the whole … “is it better to have an A in an honors course or a B in an AP course.” His response: “An A in AP course is what’s best.” No wonder kids and administrators are stressing out …</p>
<p>rocket6louise,
In florida students don’t pay for the AP exams. They are covered by the state.</p>
<p>zebes</p>
<p>@RacinReaver
My grades have been pretty indicative too. I’ve taken three AP classes before this year and two exams (didn’t understand the purpose as a sophomore).
One 5, one 4 equated to the final grades of A and B in the respective courses.</p>
<p>They’re not all good, and they’re not all bad. For my daughter, who definitely wasn’t bent in the direction of science or math, being able to take AP Calculus AB - a semester of college calculus spread over a full school year - with an excellent teacher whose students have a tremendous pass rate on the exam was a gift. A huge gift. I think she learned more than she could have possibly learned in a one-semester college lecture type course, and retained it better because the teacher spiraled through the material since by May you need to be able to demonstrate all of it, not just what you learned the previous month or two. She’s now in college, and for her major, the only remaining math requirement is statistics. We’re all thrilled. Her AP French preparation was also very, very solid, and I disagree that it was anything like “a mile wide and an inch deep.” She didn’t take AP US History because of its reputation for requiring memorization of a million facts, and I know a number of other students who made similar decisions. AP Literature was very technical, but I didn’t find it to be excessively broad.</p>
<p>Unfortunately our high school is also one where it is really AP or nothing. The “regular” US History class D took was a joke, and that really does put kids who want something more in a tough position. Sign up for all AP classes, or end up in classes with low end teachers with low ambitions and too many classmates who also have low ambitions and even lower skills.</p>
<p>Our HS has students who take 6-7 APs their Jr and Sr year. With the extra weighting, at least 4-5 per year is essential to maintain class rank.</p>
<p>My kids between the two of them have gotten 12 5’s on the APs so far. The grades in the courses were mostly A’s though younger son has had at least 1 B+. Neither kid has been overworked at all. Neither kid has taken AP English and both have gotten into some of the highest ranked colleges in the country. (And rejected by some of the finest too!)</p>
<p>At least one public high school in our county has jumped off the AP Bandwagon, by declaring their senior seminars as good or better than APs. They have the clout to convince adcoms. Many kids in that school take the APs anyway to get the credit.</p>
<p>
My daughter ran into the same problem – she got a doctor’s note, and the school STILL wouldn’t let her out of the class.</p>
<p>This all depends on the HS…
The regular classes are too easy
The Honors classes are MUCH harder
and the AP classes are insane amounts of work and MUCH harder than the Honors</p>
<p>And still our student has 4 APs this yr and will take 4-5 more next yr as a sr…because for the top schools our student is applying to, our student needs the AP Calc BC, AP Chem, AP Physics etc…etc</p>
<p>lots of work–yes absolutely and a much better value for the cost of the school…than the easy nonsense in the regular classes…</p>
<p>It is interesting to hear the admissions officer say that she is part of the system–because the AdComms do say that kids should take a rigorous curriculum and take full advantage of what the school offers.</p>
<p>Our student’s school doesn’t generally have kids in APs until Jr yr…</p>
<p>Our student does realize that the APs may not get credit at the university but that they will perhaps open doors in admissions…</p>
<p>
So true. At our HS (in spite of their strict limits on APs), at least in our son’s experience, there isn’t that much difference between the regular classes, honors and APs. They’re all hard. He was staying up past midnight many nights to finish his work when he was a freshman with only one honors class, and it’s pretty much the same now with an honors plus 3 APs.</p>
<p>
True for both of my kids.
Also true, at least for Calc, Stat, and Psych. S1 received credit for 2 physics courses with a 5 in AP PhysicsC, so that would be comparable to a true college workload. Who knows what the equivalent college workload would be for 2 semesters of AP EngLit?</p>
<p>
That’s because if a kid isn’t capable of earning an A at the AP level, he does not belong in that class, at least in theory. (I say in theory because that assumes that there is an option to take a class that IS geared to the student’s level, such as an honors course – at some high schools there may not really be a good fit class. The choice may really be between classes that are too easy and classes that are too hard.).</p>
<p>That statement doesn’t mean that all kids in AP classes should earn A’s, but jut that they should be fully capable of earning A’s with a reasonable amount of effort. </p>
<p>I think parents need to understand that for some students, there is no studying or effort at all going on to get an A in their high school’s regular level courses, and only a moderate amount of effort needed to do well in the AP level – they are exceptionally bright students who are coasting and the AP’s are the only classes they have that actually provide any challenge at all to them. And it is those kids at the high end of the intellectual spectrum that the elite colleges are looking for – Harvard doesn’t want the kid who has to struggle to get an A in an AP course, they want the kid who takes it all in stride and asks for more. </p>
<p>The problem is, that’s not every kid. I think colleges would do better to advice parents and prospective students that they want to see kids who have challenged themselves and worked to maximize their individual potential, and that AP courses are simply one way of providing evidence of that.</p>
<p>My AP Bio experience has been rather interesting. The teacher’s grading style/tests were very rigorous. Sometimes, the majority of the class would fail the test. However, these were all rather bright students(and in our school they’re pretty much(add a few more people) the only ones who take high level courses). Come AP test time, most of the students came out with 1s and 2s. I somehow came out with a 4 and had a 79 average for the class overall. However, it was one of the few classes on my schedule that actually offered a challenge with a teacher that I respected more than other teachers. I think the thing with her was that even though you might not do as well as you’re used to, you’ll be able to understand and appreciate the material.</p>
<p>AP Stats was just horrible. I don’t even want to get into how bad the subject matter/teacher was. I DON’T plan on taking the exam, and I DON’T understand/appreciate the material. He’d rather talk about Call of Duty than Stats.</p>
<p>With AP Chemistry it’s easy. Maybe because I somehow do better on it than Biology, but I think it could be because we have many people who haven’t taken Chemistry(and in our school you need to take Chemistry to be in AP Chemistry(AP Bio was cancelled because somehow not enough people showed up so they were all shoe-horned into AP Chem)). I feel confident from his teaching style to take the exam.</p>
<p>I also wish there was a middle ground. The regular classes are boring as hell and the AP classes are challenging. Honors classes really depend on the teacher.</p>
<p>I don’t like it-- it is absolutely different school by school, and it’s also different student by student-- brains develop in different ways, a kid might not be at all ready for higher level science until college age. And the schools are looking at class rank and gpa (weighted for AP’s) as ways to up their OWN rankings, and to cut the work of weeding through thousands of applications…and real whole people get lost in the shuffle. But I suppose this has been said a million times.</p>
<p>calmom, do you really think that a student who is not capable of earning an A in an AP class does not belong there? This would not be my view of the relation between grades and appropriate course selections. </p>
<p>I’ve heard different views. In math, I once had a professor who claimed that the only two “honorable” grades in a math course were A and F. His theory was that if you had enough understanding of the material to earn a D, then you could pour on the effort to understand it well enough to get an A. If you could not understand it at all, that was still “honorable” in his view. Personally, I think this view is somewhat disconnected from reality.</p>
<p>I had a friend in college who argued that a student who got an A in a course had wasted the tuition money, because the student could have advanced to the next higher level course instead. I think this view is also somewhat disconnected from reality.</p>
<p>I’ve also heard a suggestion that in math, if a student receives a D at the college level, that is a sign that the course is really too hard for them–anything above that means that the course was appropriate.</p>
<p>On the general topic, the amount of work and stress generated by AP courses depends very heavily on the expectations of the teacher and the work load. The minimum work needed to earn a 5 is “not that much,” if the teaching is reasonable and the student is adequately prepared going in. However, AP work loads can become totally unreasonable, while at the same time the course does not approach the intellectual level of a college course; or the course could have a high level, but reasonable demands, and little stress.</p>
<p>The AP exams in general are excellent exams that cover a comprehensive curriculum. I like them a lot. The thing I wonder about, having had a child that studied for 7 of them on his own, is why they have to make the high school class so time consuming. The amount of time he spent prepping for an AP exam ranged from about 30 hours to 90 hours - less time than you would spend in a class whith no homework at all! He got 5’s on all of them. I don’t understand why high schools need to make things so grueling. Also, what is this homework-every-night thing? I don’t know whether to consider that unnecessary hand-holding, or an effort to keep students under the thumb of the teacher. In a college class they would never make your schedule so contrained - you’d have a weekly problem set, or a few weeks to do a 5-10 page paper. So while the exams are good, it is not really like college.</p>
<p>“I know there are many excellent schools where students take fewer AP classes, or none at all and get a good education.”</p>
<p>I would say that I fit in the category of one of those students. I go to a public high school in New England with 27 AP courses offered as of my writing this. Well over 80% of the scores on those APs are 5s, almost all the rest are 4s.
This may be more APs than most schools offer, but at the same time, students here elect to take fewer of them. I don’t think anybody has taken more than four or five by the end of his or her junior year. In fact, sophomores taking APs is extremely rare and only began this year with our unusually gifted sophomore class; several students are enrolled in either AP stats, AP bio, or BC Calculus AP, one student taking both stats and BC calc. Being strong students, they will get 5s.
In my opinion, there is little wrong with this. They are not killing themselves taking a few APs. However, I read about people here saying their sons or daughters have 11, 12, even 17 APs and think to myself, “they’re just making things up, right?” Personally, I took AP United States History as a junior and scored a 5 and nobody I know scored below that. This year, as a senior, I’m taking AP French and AP Psychology, the former being equivalent to a 5th and 6th semester college French course and the latter a semester of introductory psych. Even taking these two courses (both honors/AP courses, although some AP courses are deemed to simple in content and are given elective labels, not affecting your GPA. The exception being AB calculus, which is slower than a college course and thus a 4.5/5.0 for an A+, like all “accelerated” courses) I am stressed. Every night I stay up to 11pm or midnight just doing homework for my two honors/AP courses, two plain honors courses, and two accelerated courses.
In my opinion, rather than completely eliminating the Advanced Placement system, it needs to be greatly reformed. It is clear to most AP students at my school that the AP exams are MUCH easier than their college equivalents. Although the rate of receiving a 5 in our BC calc course has historically been 48+/50 students per year, those that go to top schools end up retaking them anyway. Additionally, students should not be taking 6-7 courses a year. Our school limits it to six due to the constraints of an 8-period schedule and a few students a year fill their schedules to the brim with APs. Those few, no more than five, seem naturally motivated and able to handle it. Nonetheless, most people are not. It is for this reason I believe students should be limited, taking four a year, maximum; maybe even three.
I took three APs total, and it has not hindered me at all. I was accepted to every school I applied to, including Case Western, Vassar, and McGill. I will be attending Vassar, and am happy to know the college, like many, does not accept many AP exams! English, for one, will do nothing for you even if you have a 5. If you consider slightly more selective schools, such as Harvard or MIT, you will see they will only take one (if I’m not mistaken). Why then, should students torture themselves? Can they not get the extra mental stimulation they need from extracurriculars, somewhere where they are not constantly “forced” to not only perform, but excel in fear of a lower GPA?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>At our HS, if a student didn’t take any weighted classes and got a 100 in every single class, he still would not approach the top 10% of the class.</p>
<p>missypie, reminds me of the situation at our high school where we were lobbying to change the GPA formula to include arts classes, and were told that this proposal would be resisted fiercely by indignant top-of-class families whose kids’ averages would be torpedoed by an unweighted A+ in orchestra…:rolleyes:</p>