<p>Yahoo! has posted an article from the Weekly Standard that I found interesting. It's an opinion piece (and believe me, I don't often agree with WS opinion pieces!), but it struck me as a pretty balanced review of the current debate about the worth of AP, Jay Mathews and his Challenge Index, opening AP classes to more people, etc. </p>
<p>The final paragraph, I thought, was a pretty good reflection of how I feel about all of this:
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The Newsweek list is perhaps best understood as a PR stunt. Its primary purpose is to draw attention to the role AP and IB courses and exams can play in strengthening the curricula of American high schools. Despite the alarms raised by Welsh and other critics, one can think of many worse educational fads than an Advanced Placement arms race among high schools.
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[quote]
But even this Mathews takes as a good sign, meaning the AP courses will probably more closely resemble the International Baccalaureate program as a result. IB exams are even longer and involve more writing and fewer multiple choice questions, thus answering some of the progressive critics for whom the AP-type survey course has long been anathema.
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<p>This is tangential to the AP argument, and yes, I think anything that requires more graded writing is a positive development, BUT, if high school students aren't exposed to some "survey courses", particularly in history and geography, when are they going to learn basic facts? Colleges don't want to teach "surveys" anymore, and, at least in my kids' experience, middle school teachers seem incapable of getting past the Civil War, except perhaps for bringing in current newspaper articles.</p>
<p>AP is slowly morphing from being equivalent to first year college work, into becoming what was typical college prep courses. It remains to be seen if the College Board's purposed changes reverses that trend.</p>
<p>Also, taxguy, I think if you have time to look through some of his recent online columns, particularly a debate he had with one of his critics, the issue came up. The resolution, I seem to recall, is that your suggestion is a good one, but there are no large-scale studies. I think there are some very small studies that look at how well students who place out of intro courses do in the next level of classes as compared to students who take the intro course. I think the results were ambiguous.</p>