http://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/collegeadmissions
“[Colleges are] realizing that many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions.”
From the NYT Op-Ed about this report, Turning the Tide, released today.
I’m not sure how I feel about.
Not a fan of executives putting together a glossy report.
NYT Op-Ed by Frank Bruni
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/opinion/rethinking-college-admissions.html
No colleges require AP courses either, @8bagels . Which is a good thing since many high schools (both poor and wealthy) don’t offer them.
That’s good to know, problem solved.
All these kids taking such a “heavy load” of AP classes, causing “sleep deprivation, anxiety and depression,” and the “AP craze” and “AP obsession” mentioned in posts 2 and 3, will be glad to know that they are just wasting their time and stressing over nothing. Since no colleges require such courseloads, they should just drop those stressful courses.
Highly selective colleges typically prefer students who choose a decent number of the “harder” courses offered to them in high school. These may or may not be AP courses, depending on the high school.
@8bagels - Meritocracy? Common sense? Oh my we couldn’t let that happen! 
If my eighth grade DD ever plans to take AP Calculus, AP Physics & AP Chemistry, I am quite certain the result will end up being “sleep deprivation, anxiety and depression”. If my sophomore DS could not, he would be out of options for math and science for the next two years, frustrated and bored out of his mind.
I don’t need Harvard or even my local school board to do anything about the above situation. At my house we will navigate through it just fine, through our own personal choices.
@LOUKYDAD. This is exactly it. I’m not going to push my running kid to keep up with the top runner in the school. She’d have a heart attack! But some parents try to push their kids well beyond their ability and they are suffering greatly trying to keep up.
That said, I do think it would be appropriate for the college board to review the history curricula. There are many complaints about the workloads in these classes and I wonder how accurately they reflect an intro survey college course.
A high school student is generally taking at most 8 courses, and many are taking 7 or 6. Even if those classes are all AP classes, which they rarely are, we are talking about something which is supposed to be equivalent to taking 3-4 college courses per semester. This should not be unmanageable for a high school upperclassman heading to a highly selective college. After all, in another year, they will be handling 4-5 college classes. If it’s too much in hs, how will they manage at a tough college?
I think part of the problem is the way some teachers teach these courses. They have kids doing crazy things like outlining the entire text book. My younger son took AP World, APUSH and AP Euro. The AP World teacher didn’t pace the course very well and ended up giving Saturday sessions in April to catch up, but the other courses just weren’t that onerous. My kid got fives on all of them. Older son only took APUSH, he was not a history buff, but he also got a five.
Part of the correlation between income and test scores:
Intelligent parents tend to produce intelligent kids
Intelligent people tend to make more money
Yes, the AP history outlining is timeconsuming, but when I suggested to my kids that they skimp on it, both the non-perfectionist and the perfectionist insisted that it was a valuable study tool. Older kid said that some kids copy outlines off the web and that they didn’t do well on the tests. I can believe that it’s a lot less work at some schools (and we don’t even have real papers!) but we do have extremely high pass rates so evidently even the slackers are learning the material better than at some schools.
The workload in AP courses at some schools far exceeds the work needed to score a 5–even a “high 5.” The time consumed by AP courses varies a lot from school to school.
The difference is that college students are not taking 8 classes and do not have to be in school for 7.5 hours a day, as many HS students are. They are not taking gym or other non-academic electives. They go to class for maybe 20 hours per week, not close to forty. Yet in some HS courses, the amount of work outside the classroom is almost as much as in the college course, but with less time. Many college kids (not in engineering or certain other areas) add in a “fun” elective to balance out the intense workload of the other courses. Plus, it is still 7 to 8 different subjects, compared to 4. The work per class may be a bit higher in college, but probably not double the high school work load. Many kids from our HS say college is easier, at least freshman year.
The APUSH and even Euro outlining seemed a bit much. My son handled it fine, but not sure he thought it had much value.
^ Indeed. Due to an administrative fiat at our high school resulting from parents’ complaints about excessive homework, teachers have scaled back A LOT the last two weeks. If this had been our normal, I’d have been sounding like mathyone and others who just can’t see what the big deal is with AP’s, unless the kid is being pushed above where he should be. Regrettably, school culture and teacher style can make a huge difference in workload.
Reading the history courses, taking notes, writing a paper or two, and studying for exams is just fine for workload. But add in a large creative project due every week or two, and it can get excessive. Here’s an example of a project D had to do for AP Euro: research an absolute ruler, and turn him into a superhero. Design his costume, and come up with his superpower, sidekick, chief nemesis, headquarters, motto, weakness, special equipment, etc. all displayed artistically on a large poster. Then, she had to design an original board game to go along with it. I think she had fun and the project had some value, but it took hours upon hours to do it. Now add in similar projects in English (diorama of a scene from the novel) and other classes (build your own thermometer)–all on top of normal problems sets and other daily homework–and the load gets pretty intense.
The dilemma for a lot of students attending a school where a lot of AP classes is offered is that unless that take a good number of them, they are not considered to have taken the "most rigorous " level of classes which is what the colleges want to see.
College students are taking 8-10 classes, more than most hs students. They just don’t spread the material out over a year, as is done in many, but not all high schools. Hs kids have 30 hours per week of class, not 40, and that is without study halls, so at most 10 hours more in the classroom. Some of that is spent working homework problems, either as a class, or, as my kids have found, after having completed some classwork assignment while waiting for other kids to finish. If one of those 6-8 hs classes is PE there is no homework associated with it. Even an easy college class has a few hours per week of homework. If you are going to count hs lunch as class time you also need to count college lunch. So yes, hs kids spend more time in class but the difference is not as great as you portray.
Superhero posters? Dioramas? … I think the problem is that the AP teachers at your school aren’t clear on whether they’re teaching a college-lite survey course or the 4th grade.
There are external consultants that your district can hire to review and certify an AP teacher’s curriculum. Maybe they can come in and tell these teachers that having so many busywork projects is unnecessary and really doesn’t teach the kids anything.
I marvel that in some high schools kids are given time to start homework in class. Here, that practice stopped in elementary school.
My son was in class from 7:25 am to just before 3 pm, which is 7.5 hours.The point being college kids are only taking 4 classes at a time - not 8 (or 5 not 8 or 10). College classes often meet for only 3 hours a week. I was not counting gym time as a class, but as time when a student can’t be working on homework. IIn some HS’s kids can grab lunch in the library, but not in all. A college kid can grab a sandwich and eat in the library or her room. Some HS kids have study halls, but at our HS the top level students do not. They take an elective instead.
Your point seemed to be that no HS kids (or parents) should find taking 6 or 8 AP or honors classes taxing because they are equivalent in the level of material taught at colllege. My point is that the structure of HS and taking more classes at once can lead to a higher workload on HS kids.
I am glad to hear that some things are changing at TheGFG’s D’s school!
I would also like to comment that in all the years I have taught at a university, I have never assigned a diorama, a superhero project, or a poster.
My grad students do present posters in poster sessions at conferences. This is different–for one thing, it’s once or twice a year, and for another, it is a major means of scientific communication. For a third, there is no glitter on these posters. Although, now that I think of that . . .
I don’t think many of the teachers of advanced courses agree with having to assign creative projects, but from what I gather the district curriculum dictates that they must vary the type of work give so as to accommodate different learning styles and give different types of kids the chance to excel.
I hope the changes are permanent, but I think they could be a temporary effect since teachers know a homework study is underway. No teacher wants to be outed to the administration for assigning excessive homework, even though they are guilty.
I actually was disappointed that the AP history classes including so many short writing assignments for the DBQ and the other type of response (which I can’t remember now), but virtually no longer research papers. When I took APUSH, we had one research paper each marking period (except the last one). I thought we learned a lot from that. I remember going to the local university library to get original sources, which helped in college (and the teacher had some copied which would work if no such library nearby, we just happened to have University library access).
To be fair, all HS juniors in our district are required to do a long research paper. The quality required varies by teacher, but they do a reasonably good job of getting kids to learn how to take notes, outline, and then produce a paper. More research papers are certainly a good thing IMHO (but not to an excessive amount).