<p>I was in college long ago, so I do not know what it is like now. However, I don't think the lab time in AP chemistry or physics is anywhere like those in college.</p>
<p>"reflectivemom, would you post the results of your computation? I agree that the school year in MA may differ from the school year in other states."</p>
<p>Marite, I don't know what about this topic is so difficult for you to understand. My point is that you can't assess - based upon the number of days in the school year and the title of the textbook, the pace of instruction. </p>
<p>Just as colleges can assign research projects, outside reading, extra laboratories, etc. So can high schools. Only someone who evaluates the SPECIFIC workload for the SPECIFIC AP class can make a judgment regarding "pace of instruction". </p>
<p>AP only certifies the "minimum" criteria. Similarly, AP Scores only apply to this "minimum" criteria. Many teachers go above and beyond.</p>
<p>I think it's a fair point to make that the quality 6f AP courses varies just as the quality of college classes does, even sections of the same course from the same department at a particular school. My daughter graduated with seven AP's and my son is now graduating with ten. She did not want to pursue a language at the AP level; he did. He would have taken more, but scheduling conflicts in a small high school prevented this (AP Music Theory for example, for his own edification.)</p>
<p>These courses have all been rigorous. For example, my daughter got her first C (C+) in AP Global in tenth grade. This was quite a learning experience for her. She went on to score a 5 on the exam, and she has yet to get a C after two years in an Ivy. Therefore, I conclude her teacher was at least a rigorous as a college prof. Another one of her teachers awarded only ten percent of his students A's. D. was one on some occasions. She scored a 4 on US Gov't. exam, but more important, she learned Supreme Court caseswhich she considered the first time she learned something truly conceptual to prepare her for her career in law.</p>
<p>Math and Science as a different story; she's a Humanities person. However, even here these courses were useful on a personal level. She tool AP Calc AB and really had to work for the 3. She learned how hard she could work. When faced with Math requirement in college she opted for Logicn as essential for Law; therefore had she not taken AP calc she would never have explored calc at all, and she truly loved it although it does not come easily to her. I love differentials! she will often say. She also earned a 3 on AP Bio. To satisfy Science requrement she did re-take course. School only allowed this for those scoring under 4, and only for 3's who did not want to pursue science. She did well (not brilliantly), and she became a mentor to the other students in lab sections since she knew how an experiment should be set up. This gave her the confidence to pursue higher level bio course (all new material) for her ssecond science requirement.</p>
<p>She feels that only AP classes orepared her for college.</p>
<p>I do, however, have two caveats. I think it is unconscionable for schools to herd kids whom they have every indication will not do well into AP classes to improve their scores on Newsweeks survey. This demoralizes some kids and significantly lowers GPA's. Honors Programs should be maintained in all disciplines.</p>
<p>Second (but this is probably just my hobby horse as a college Lit. prof.), I think the AP English courses as the weakest link in the chain for several reasons. 1) English teachers frequently don't have adequate training for this course; 2) English teachers are very reluctant to given C's and D's to good students (unlike other disciplines in which gradibg is more objective; 3) trying to teach writing by formula violates the self-expressive nature of language; and lastly, 4) truly comprehensive discussions of major works of literature are usually not appropriate in a high school setting because of political, sexual, psychological content. I have had many students who did well in AP English who came into English 101 barely doing C work. I've had great difficulty convincing them of this, and I am one of the least hard-assed teachers in my department.</p>
<p>Sorry, for this long post. My main point is that AP classes enrich students' experiences beyond just the expectations of ad coms.</p>
<p>reflectivemom:</p>
<p>Okay, so you do not wish to back up your statement with statistics.
So I will take your comments as impressionistic.</p>
<p>Marite, okay, so you when you can't understand the "big picture" you first try to "namedrop" (as if throwing the Harvard label out gives instant validity). When that doesn't work you say I won't back up my statement with statistics. </p>
<p>But, it is you who cannot see that simplistic statistics do not tell the full story. </p>
<p>In Dad'0'2's post above. He states that his son took Physics C - both sections in a double period class. At our school, they offer three versions of AP Physics C. In one class, Physics C Mechanics is taught all year in a single period class. In a second version, Physics C - both sections Mechanics and Electromagnetism - is covered in a single period class. And, a third version covered both sections of AP Physics C, as well as a course in Modern Physics (optics, sound, etc) in one period during the year with additional labs from "experimental physics" all in the same single period class. A student in this third version submitted this syllabus and his lab reports and skipped not only the first year of Physics, but one semester of his sophmore year and a junior elective at the top engineering school in the country. </p>
<p>So, how can you justify making simplistic statements regarding the pace of an AP course? Do you still believe just knowing the number of days, the minutes per day and the text going to illustrate the complexity of these alternatives?</p>
<p>And my son took Physics C (both M and E) with a 45 minute period every day, a lab tacked on every other day and a school year that starts after labor day so that they spent the last month of school watching movies. In contrast, his biology teacher made them do real work after the exam and gave them so many handouts the pile was three feet high by the end of the year. (He got 5s on both exams but the bio course was a lot more work.)</p>
<p>^^ Exactly, my point. The AP courses vary so much between schools, between subject areas, even between teachers - it's impossible to make a blanket assessment.</p>
<p>I did not realize that mentioning the number of hours in a class at Harvard was name-dropping. But okay, let me use another school to which students who flock to AP classes might apply: U of Chicago. And let me compare the length of its courses with what one might expect in an Illinois high school.</p>
<p>In Illinois, schools are required to provide 880 hours of instruction. Divided into seven subjects, this would come to 125 hours (I had calculated 120 based on our school year). The University of Chicago runs on a quarter system, which makes the academic year longer than Harvard's by four weeks.
Each quarter is ten weeks. vs. the Harvard semester of thirteen weeks. While a Harvard student is expected to take four classes per semester (some take five), a Chicago student is expected to take three or four per semester. A typical class at Harvard meets three hours a week, including section, although some profs hold sections in addition to three hours of lectures. So a semester course would involve usually 39 hours of instruction (including sections) and at most 42 hours. I am not including labs in this calculation, nor am I including double periods in my estimate of the hours of instruction in an AP class.</p>
<p>Let us assume that a Chicago student spends more hours per week of classtime for the same subject as a Harvard student on the semester schedule (this being made possible by the fewer number of classes per quarter), say, five hours. This would amount to 50 hours per subject. </p>
<p>I don't see how so much time can be wasted in high school that the same subject can be taught in 120-125 hours vs. 40-50 hours in college. If an AP course, however, is the equivalent of a full-year college class (80-100 hours), then I suppose twenty hours per year can be wasted. I still feel, however, that distractions do slow down the pace of instruction, no matter why they happen.</p>
<p>Wow! There are some pretty impressive high schools out there, given the descriptions of some of the courses available. </p>
<p>There is obviously a big range in the quality and rigor of the AP classes, just as there is a big range in the quality of college classes. There is seemingly no limit on what an excellent teacher can accomplish with a critical mass of gifted students.</p>
<p>I am really puzzled by this "dispute", reflectivemom. As I understand it, marite's point was that a typical high school AP class will involve about 4 hours/week of classroom time, about 30 weeks/year, or 120 classroom hours (call it 100 with time off for other stuff) over the course of a year, whereas a typical college course will have maybe 30 hours of classroom time per semester, 60 per year. Given that most AP tests are equivalent to a one-semester course, the classroom time ratio is 3-1 or more.</p>
<p>You give three examples, none of which conform to the AP course protocols (no separate labs), two of which are clearly subject to marite's critique, and a third which is impressive but way beyond what people mean when they talk about an AP class. I have no idea where your son goes to school, but mine goes to a 2500-kid public academic magnet, and it has all of 12 kids taking Physics C AP (5 hours/week, counting lab time). It's great that your child's school offers one course option that may in fact move at the pace of a college course, by virtue of covering 50% more material in substantially less classroom time than AP requires for use of its brand, but that is so far beyond what's typical for an AP class that it's not really worth discussing much.</p>
<p>EDIT: Cross-posted, obviously, with marite. Chicago does not have more classroom time/week than Harvard for these courses, by the way. And I don't think the AP courses are supposed to be equivalent to a full-year college course.</p>
<p>
[quote]
AP Global
[/quote]
</p>
<p>What is AP global? On the College Board site for parents showing AP courses </p>
<p><a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/subjects.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/subjects.html</a> </p>
<p>there is no course of that name. The same is true of the AP subjects page for educators.</p>
<p>Just as FYI, the AP physics teacher email list recently had an unscientific survey of AP physics teachers to report the number of minutes of classroom contact hours they have with students from the start of the course to the date of AP physics test. </p>
<p>Physics B
Count 54<br>
Mean 8373<br>
Median 7932<br>
Min 4681<br>
Max 17000 </p>
<p>Physics C</p>
<p>Mechanics only
Count 15
Mean 7230
Median 7270
Minimum 5920
Maximum 9090</p>
<p>Oops! Sorry. This shorthand must have just been for our high school. I referred to AP World History, called AP World or, fondly,, AP Global, by both my kids and their friends.</p>
<p>Just some one liners:</p>
<p>Although son scored 5's on calc bc he still took calc II in college and learned new material. Math is his strong point but he refused to move ahead without knowing all of it cold. Perfect scores on all math standardized tests. Happy he took it.</p>
<p>Son is physics major. Was told to not use his Physics C Ap (score 5,5) to jump ahead. Department found students who jumped ahead (even with 5's)ended up making B's in advanced courses instead of A's. He learned proper way to do labs for his particular college.</p>
<p>He was happy to be done with all the humanities before college started. He had no desire to be in a class with English/History majors setting the curve and hours upon hours of extra readings. </p>
<p>Happily a science/math/computer geek and immersed in those classes for the next three years.</p>
<p>Mythmom, we tend to call it AP Global too. Are you in NY? </p>
<p>My younger son is slated to take AP World next year as the second year of require Global History.</p>
<p>What Carnegie Mellon (at least SCS) does is give a math exam. Their theory is that if you don't remember what was on the AP there's not much point in taking the next level course. They seem to have a range of math courses, so that you aren't necessarily stuck at reviewing all of calculus.</p>
<p>Tokenadult, that's interesting that some physics B classes are taking more than 3 times as long with the material.</p>
<p>JHS:</p>
<p>Thanks for the info on Chicago. I wasn't sure, so wanted to err on the side of being generous as to the amount of class-time.
As for the AP-equivalency, I went by Harvard's rather generous policy of allowing Advanced Standing with 4 AP scores of 5. Since the normal courseload is 4 per semester, this ought to make the 4 AP courses equal to 4 full-year courses. I do believe that BC-Calc is supposed to cover Calc 1&2, and that at many colleges, intro-US history is covered in two semesters, though it may be an option whether to take only one semester or both. I think the same thing may apply to AP-Euro; I know that the Intro-Bio my son took was spread over two semesters and used the same textbook as AP-Bio.</p>
<p>mathmom:
At Harvard <em>everyone</em> is supposed to take the math placement test as well as English, and languages; it covers Calculus, but does not go beyond that level. I think many other colleges have the same testing during freshman orientation week.</p>
<p>There's something screwy in tokenadult's numbers, though. Since mechanics is usually only a half-year segment of Physics C, it's hard to believe that the minimum number of classroom hours anyone spent on it was almost 100. But it's also hard to believe that only 15 teachers responded, and 54 to the B. So maybe this was limited to year-long mechanics courses?</p>
<p>Also . . . 17,000 minutes? Almost 300 hours? Someone is recording time like a lawyer there!</p>
<p>Some of the teachers in the online survey showed their work (enumerated minutes per class, and classes per week, and weeks per school term) and some did not. A voluntary response survey is not authoritative data on the underlying issue, but the teachers were curious there, so one asked, and parents seemed to be curious here, so I passed on the summary compiled by the teacher who took the responses. (I just dragged my mouse to copy and paste. He said that he may have made a few data-entry errors.)</p>