<p>Our kids’ school absolutely shares the viewpoint of this video. Although it’s a rigorous private school with very hardworking, super-bright kids, and it places them well in top schools…they refuse to play along with what they see as a big business that is hurting teenagers. </p>
<p>As such, they discourage APs, they deliberately offer very few AP courses, and only to seniors who have already jumped through other hurdles. Then again this school isn’t interested in competing to be ‘ranked’ as a HS in USNWR.</p>
<p>Thank you for the link. $83 times 2.3 million tests is a mighty big number. And then multiply that by the $15 per report CB charges to send your scores. It seems as though many, many students take the classes primarily for a GPA boost, but the colleges do keep it going with the “take the most rigorous curriculum available.” </p>
<p>The way high schools could turn this around–and it may have been mentioned is to reduce AP offerings and then they could say that students took the most rigorous curriculum. At DD’s high school, students had to be recommended for the classes, had to have permission to take more than three at a time, and were required to take the test at the end. Of course, my child got permission for five classes senior year and it about drove her over the edge. She did end up as a Nat’l AP Scholar, but at what cost?</p>
<p>Our high school, with three magnet programs, is AP intensive. It’s not uncommon for some kids to take up to five APs. For some kids, it’s the wrong reason. DS told me about a conversation he had with a friend who doesn’t want to take 5 APs in 11th grade, but the parents are insisting. However, for every story of a kid who is being pressured, there is also the kid who is being challenged appropriately. My middle son took 10 APs in high school and was never stressed out like the video describes. He never stayed up late at night and he had all kinds of other activities. It comes down to making the right choices for each kid – and for some, lots of AP classes is the right choice. The problem is that too many other kids then feel pressured to do take more than they should.</p>
<p>An alternative to loading up on AP classes might be starting college at age 15 or 16. At the same age my own children were taking AP’s, I was already in college. I did not have to load up on AP classes to get admitted to a good college. </p>
<p>I am wondering if the level of instruction at top colleges and honors colleges has been ramped up, though, to accommodate students who have already gotten 5’s on AP exams. My children have found that their freshman “weeder” math and science classes have been full of such students. </p>
<p>Sometimes AP classes are badly taught by teachers who are not comfortable at that level themselves. That creates a different set of stresses.</p>
<p>Absolutely. I would go farther and say for MOST kids. its the wrong reason. If colleges stopped encouraging it, and students grades were not weighted, you’d suddenly discover very few kids taking AP ‘for the challenge’. </p>
<p>Just like ‘show passion for extra-curriculars’, get a ‘high GPA’ , “be a leader” so on…for some gifted children it comes naturally and is enriching. For many or most, it’s not about intellectual curiosity, passion, being challenged, or doing these things because they are intrinsically interested, but because its entirely instrumental and part of the whole insane resume grooming process and game playing around college admissions. Who are we kidding? </p>
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<p>I am not convinced. What I find curious is back in the day American HS kids took few APs and students were not starving for stimulation (even for both my husband and I who happen to have been highly gifted students, who later got PhDs and became professors…we weren’t dying of boredom just because we didn’t have the challenge of APs at our american public schools). Likewise, as I see now in Canada, APs are relatively rare but there is not a dying horde of brilliant minds starving for ‘challenge’. Regular highschool does them just fine (our kids are in high gifted range and couldn’t care less about AP…because its not part of college admissions).</p>
<p>Thirty years ago, plenty of students were starved for stimulation… I was, as were many of my adult friends. This was in “good” suburban public schools. However, back then it was more accepted to take real college courses during high school if you had a nearby college. Also I think it was more common to skip grades back then, not that that helped the slow pace of the classes.</p>
<p>You need to understand the details about AP. Disclaimer: please feel free to correct these!</p>
<p>*Newsweek publishes a list of the “top high schools in the country” each year, and it is totally based on the ratio of number of tests taken : total number of students.</p>
<p>*Collegeboard makes TONS of money with AP courses: they design the curriculum, certify the instructors, develop the tests, and charge oodles for tests and test scores.</p>
<p>*high schools offer them to strive for Newsweek’s listing and to appease the parents.</p>
<p>*high schools dislike them b/c they may have to hire specific type of teachers.</p>
<p>*teachers tell me they don’t like them b/c the curriculum covers so much material they never have time to get into any sort of depth.</p>
<p>*kids take them b/c they’re more “advanced” and good for college applications. Rarely they’ll say, “it’s because I get to learn XX”. (although, to be fair, my son happened to take certain AP courses b/c some favorite teacher teaches it.)</p>
<p>*kids/parents think if they get a 3-5 score, they can skip a college requirement (note: this is usually not true. More likely, it allows the student to move to a higher level. Some colleges don’t accept certain AP credits, like Psychology.)</p>
<p>I take four AP classes this year…and I can tell you I haven’t gotten a good nights sleep in about three months, and even with it all I got two B’s for the semester…we’ll see how far my rank drops.</p>
<p>Loved the video and sent it to all of my friends.</p>
<p>I absoulutely loved the video. I felt it presented the pressure for taking APs brilliantly and stated reasons why people do take those classes. I was amazed when students had to sign a contract saying they wouldn’t drop the course because that is absolutely ridiculous. Junior year I dropped AP US History because I felt that I wasn’t learning I was just memorizing and spewing that information out. I also had some family issues going on at the same time. My teacher didn’t care that I dropped out and I see him everyday and he doesn’t hold a grudge against me. I was his student aide last semester and we got a long fine. I saw my friends get 2 or 3 hours a sleep completing work my APUSH and just not coming to school the day before the exam so they could study. I didn’t want that. I felt that the pressure was too much for me and the people in class stressed me out more than the work because they were grade grubbers. I am not a stereotypical CC student and I feel that kids who take 4 or 5 AP classes a year plus ECs and other committments are so stressed out they don’t know what do with themselves. </p>
<p>It is now senior year I will have taken three AP classes by the end of my high school career: AP Lang, AP Lit, and AP Art History. My school only offers Calc AB and BC, Span Lang, Latin, French Lang, US History, Euro History, Lang, Lit, and Bio. I didn’t have the level of Spanish needed for AP and most of my friends struggle with it and those who have spoken Spanish their whole lives struggle too. I wish I could’ve taken Psych but my school doesn’t offer it. I like some of my elective classes better than my AP classes like Modern American History: 1945 - Present which focuses on key events between the dropping of the atom bomb to things going on right now. I don’t care that I haven’t taken a ridiculous number of APs. My general eds for college are only 12 credits total and I am actually interested in many of the things offered and I don’t care if I have to take them freshmen/sophomore year.</p>
<p>The number of AP’s in a reasonable load depends very heavily on the school and on the work load that is imposed by the teachers, beyond the work required by the AP syllabus itself. The work in a set of 5 AP syllabi actually should not pose a problem for most juniors or seniors (with the possible exception of Physics C E&M, if the students’ background in math and physics is inadequate at the beginning of the class).</p>
<p>In my opinion, a situation where students are getting 2 or 3 hours of sleep a night is most likely traceable to unreasonable expectations of additional work, in the AP classes, or in the non-AP classes, or both.</p>
<p>Beware of thinking a 5 on an AP exam means that you know the material. The scoring curves are extremely generous, with around a 65-70% being the break between a 4 and a 5. That’s right, barely passing gets you a 5. Especially in math and science, I wouldn’t recommend using AP to skip a class in college unless your score was a very strong 5.</p>
<p>Sleep is so important for growth, development, emotional balance etc…and some people do well with 5 hrs, others need 9…</p>
<p>as far as our kids go–I “pull the plug” on any homework by midnight-- meaning I send them to bed, whether they are done or not…</p>
<p>our oldest student handles 4 AP classes and honors physics etc…and is a varsity athlete–the grades this semester were 4 As 2 Bs and thats the best our student has had in 3 yrs…</p>
<p>even with honors classes our student pulled mostly Bs or usually a 3/3 split As to Bs…</p>
<p>Our student will now get to bed by 10:30/11p and is pretty good at time mgt…many a morning our student is tired because of the havey sport pratice schedule not the academics</p>
<p>A friend of the family has like a 4.4 gpa and gets as little as 3 hrs sleep–and some nights none–carrying the equal load opf our student and is also a high performance athlete…
Granted the GPA is higher (a 4.4 vs 3.9) so I guess it is working for that student.</p>
<p>Our student just needs sleep and I feel really strongly about good sleeping habits. In this case if our student was up every night I would require our student to cut back on the APs…I am a firm believer in balance, health, emotional/mental down time etc …</p>
<p>I believe some kids can handle the schedule and less sleep naturally, our two students are not that way</p>
<p>ap classes at the local high school here are insanely hard. so much so that my ds1 says his honors college classes are - by comparison - easier. the problem was - with his application round - that i did not think the gs noted that the degree of difficulty of the ap track was ‘much’ tougher than the honors track - ds was routinely up at 2am, routinely turning in 1 5page paper weekly for aplit, and another 3 page paper weekly for history - both after reading hundreds of pages for each class weekly. that said, ds was very, very well prepared for college, finds the workload light by comparison — leaving me to wonder whether or not ap classes serve - where the admission person knows the school - as a kind of cross comparison device for the kids in the top of the class.</p>
<p>You make a valid point, geomom, and I have no complaint about heavier workloads in AP’s that result in more actual learning. Locally (and <em>not</em> in Hilbert space!) there are a lot of assignments that are simply wasteful of the students’ time. Combine the low benefit with the sleep costs and you start to have a good argument for home schooling.</p>
<p>I think most students would profit from more time to read and particularly from more time to think about the material. Anyone who lives in an area where the classes permit or even require this is very fortunate.</p>
<p>I insisted that my children get enough sleep, too. The one that did sports was actually asleep by 9:30 at night most nights, and found it hard to believe that classmates actually stayed up until mid-night. And he still managed a full AP schedule with mostly A’s. The other child took naps in the afternoon. Time management was crucial, though, especially with their extracurricular schedules, and this was difficult with teachers who gave huge last minute assignments. My children learned to appreciate the college syllabus, to say the least.</p>
<p>I think it helped that my children took most of their summers off from the treadmill of resume building, spending their time instead on semi-structured exploration of their interests. They read library books, made their way through self-instruction manuals, spent time with aging grandparents, visited museums, etc. Not to mention incidentally getting some background in the subjects they would be studying. This put some actual joy into learning and gave them reasons for wanting AP classes besides getting that weighted GPA and impressing colleges.</p>
<p>SO…that is how the teacher divides her teaching time. I’ve never heard of a more blatant example of teaching to a test. It matters not if the teacher thinks Pre-Columbian to 1789 deserves a third of the time, or that it takes the students longer to understand that era - The College Board gives it 20% of the weight, so that is exactly how much of the school year she devotes to it.</p>
<p>S2 has 2 AP’s this year (all that is offered) and the rest honors courses. He loves his APUSH class even though the work load is tremendous - got an A first semester. He specifically enjoys the teacher (used to be a college professor) and really loves the way he is teaching critical thinking. It has been fun to watch how he now uses this skill to approach other issues. Having said that, he has ZERO interest in taking any more AP classes, but his GC is trying to push him into it. S2 says it is not worth the stress unless the teacher is good.</p>
<p>I went to public high school long before the AP emphasis. Even before top schools wanted resumes full of EC’s. Nonetheless, honors classes were difficult and time-consuming, not to mention competitive. The top handful of students had few EC’s, but still studied ALL THE TIME as the cost of maintaining that perfect or near-perfect GPA, even at the cost of a good night’s sleep. I admit however that it was easier to be just below the top than it seems to be now.</p>
<p>One advantage of the AP grading system, though, is that it prepares students for heavily curved classes at the college level. Also, many college classes move quickly too, especially the intro classes that AP is designed to duplicate, and students have to learn how to manage their time so that they are not taking too many detours and missing the overview.</p>