<p>Both of my kids’ private day schools limited APs. At DD’s school, no APs were offered to freshmen, sophomores could take an AP history, and juniors and seniors could take no more than three without permission from the school. The workload was overwhelming, so the limits were good. </p>
<p>At DS’s school, kids had to be recommended to take any APs, so he did not take any. :(</p>
<p>What I have found at our school is that it depends on how much the parent/kid wants to fight the policy. For example, when my son was an incoming Freshman he wanted to take AP Music Theory. He had 8 years of theory lessons with a private instructor. We were told that Freshman were not allowed to take ANY AP classes. We believed this and backed down. Four weeks into the semester we found out that another child was allowed to take 2 AP classes as a Freshman. </p>
<p>At our school AP is weighted 1 point and Honors are weighted .5, this kid was slotted number one until mid semester this year due to his being “allowed” to do something that was against policy. I find this unfair to all the kids. I believe that if there is a policy in place, stick with it or have guidelines for when/if exceptions can be made. </p>
<p>My son has found that AP and CC classes are the only classes in which he has been challenged.</p>
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<p>However, the vast majority of high schools are not places where the regular or honors courses are better than AP courses. While some criticize AP courses as “a mile wide and an inch deep”, most high schools’ non-AP courses would likely be “a quarter mile wide and an inch deep”.</p>
<p>Of course, just because a high school offers AP courses does not mean that those courses are taught well, using the AP test as the standard. If the A students in those AP courses get 1 scores on the AP tests, that is not a good sign.</p>
<p>^^^Yep, yep, yep. That’s why I say I don’t knock them; often APs are the best courses a school has to offer and, when taught well, can provide students with a real challenge. In our local case, the lackluster scores are a testament to a lackluster program.</p>
<p>Districts can offer AP or IB which require teachers familiar with the curriculum( & in the case of IB, the school needs to jump through many hoops).</p>
<p>Students can also take courses at a local university or community college, and don’t require anything of the district except some loss of seat time.
Self study of AP is also an option which is chosen by students in areas with few resources.</p>
<p>At my kids’ public HS (a good, suburban HS) it is required that all juniors take a non-AP US History course and English lit course. Both courses are far more rigorous than the equivalent AP courses. That is two out of the six possible courses to take for junior year. So some schools already have requirements that are more rigorous than AP classes. It is typical, then, at our high school to only be able to take two AP classes junior year and two or three, at most, senior year. Freshman and Sophomores cannot take any AP classes unless they are so far advanced in math that they are at the AP Calculus level.</p>
<p>Our public, suburban HS offers 19 AP classes. There’s no limit on how many you can take, and anyone can take them (you don’t have to recommended). However, the counselors hold an assembly each year and scare the bejeezus out of the kids, stressing how difficult and time-consuming AP classes are and warning them not to take more than one a year. I think that’s scared a lot of kids away from APs who could have done just fine with them.</p>
<p>Conversely, our cross-town rival HS strongly encourages students to take as many APs as they want, so almost everyone takes a few each year. None of the teachers there want to teach AP classes because they hate dealing with the many parents who are upset that their kids are doing poorly.</p>
<p>Our suburban HS does not limit. My older son took all AP classes as a senior - I think it was 7 senior year alone, maybe 13 total? Problem for him was the college he chose limited the credits students could bring in to a max of 32. My younger son is taking about 4 senior year, and took 4junior year. I think they each took one sophomore year. I’m not sure if our school encourages or discourages students, but it was never a problem for my kids to get into AP, so I’m guessing they don’t discourage.</p>
<p>Our kids’ school limits APs to 3 per year, but you can take 4 with the permission of the College Counselor. We like them because they tend to fill the class with motivated kids and the discussions and pace are better. The colleges our kids like only allow 4 APs for credit, so many are just for high school credit - that’s fine. If we really cared that much, the local university will take all of them and the kids could graduate early. We are in no rush, however.</p>
<p>Wow, all youre kids sound pretty smart! : o ) But I do think there are limits for a reason too. Parents can push their kids TOO hard and they end up unhappy. Also, there are some things that you cannot take a class to learn, but I wish they would be taught: there should be AP manners and AP finances.</p>
<p>Our private prep school limits kids to 3 APs per year, and none before Junior year (unless they are ready for AP Calc). The regular courses are challenging and with classes that have 1-3 hours of homework a night, I think the school is trying to protect the kids from overloading their schedules to keep ahead of the pack. Colleges know about this limit and the kids seem to get into very selective schools. The school is also moving away from some APs (mostly science) and replacing them with very challenging courses that they say are not “an inch deep and a mile wide.” I think different schools may limit the number for different reasons though.</p>
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<p>Wouldn’t it be the case that most high school teachers majored in the subject that they teach when they were undergraduates, then got a teaching credential? If so, then shouldn’t (for example) all high school math teachers be familiar with calculus, having taken it and real analysis themselves as math majors in college? Shouldn’t all high school English teachers be familiar with lots of different literary works in English from their own experience?</p>
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<p>Couldn’t a high school with advanced students ready for college-level work offer courses modeled on actual college courses? In many cases, such courses would be a superset of the AP syllabus, so that students could take the AP test if they want and get 5 scores.</p>
<p>The private prep HS our kids attended had the parents come to an event just before the students selected their courses every year. The GC would address everyone and recommend that students only take one or at the most two APs per year. We pulled the GC aside later and told her that S had indicated he planned to take all APs plus marching band for his SR year. She laughed and said, “Yes, that’s fine for your S. The statements I made were for most of the students and families that attend this school. There are students and families who know who they are who can get approval to take whatever they prefer and do just fine. Your S is one of those.” He did take all of those APs and enjoyed them and did very well in the courses and AP exams (nearly all 5s, including exams on some where he just self-studied the subjects, “for fun”). He entered his freshman year with 60 credits from his APs and the one course he had taken at a local U. Others in his engineering school entered with similar #s of credits.</p>
<p>I think the schools want to be sure that students aren’t overloaded with too many APs. As others have mentioned, it may be a matter of resources as well. S took at least two APs that had only himself and one other student in the course. Public schools generally cannot afford such small student to teacher ratios, and many private schools won’t allow them either.</p>
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<p>A cynic might argue that it only stands to reason that elite, exclusive privates would now denigrate APs and claim to offer something better now that access to APs has been democratized. To do otherwise would make it harder to justify the tuition. </p>
<p>One also might note that the “inch-deep/mile-wide” criticism is facile. The same criticism can be leveled against any actual collegiate introductory survey course. However, in a world where media has become more “narrow-cast” at the same time cultural diversity has increased, a well-taught survey course can be absolutely essential to giving students a common background and training from which to explore the depths. You may think AP World History moves too fast and covers too much – and it does – but the alternative for most of America outside the leafy precincts in which CC posters reside is a generation of high school students who learned most of what they think they know about the topic from Sid Meier’s Civilization games (and think that Gandhi really was an *******). </p>
<p>Finally, a curmudgeon might note that “teaching to the test” is exactly what a good college instructor does. When professors give final exams that don’t relate to the material covered in class, we all think it’s horrible. Complaints about teaching to the test generally unpack as complaints that the test is stupid. My sense is that most AP exams are fairly well designed, reasonably substantive, and relatively fair. If not, perhaps we should see if they can be improved to, say, the quality of the British A-levels.</p>
<p>Not all states require educators to have anything but an education degree.
Likewise because of the district interest in the Newsweek ranking list, some are pushing hard for every student to take AP classes/tests, since ranking doesn’t note the score, just that the student took the test.
Because of red tape, it isn’t unusual to have substitutes teaching a class, subs don’t need to have an endorsement in the subject they are teaching.</p>
<p>@SomeOldGuy</p>
<p>You said everything, and more, I wanted to say.</p>
<p>My D’s first high school didn’t allow students to take APs until they’d exhausted all the honors courses first. This usually meant you didn’t take an AP course until junior year. We never thought of this as a problem. The honors classes were sometimes more rigorous and interesting than the AP classes, because APs follow a nationally standardized curriculum, so the teachers are limited in what they can teach if they hope to cover all the material on the AP exam.</p>
<p>I’d worry more about a school that had freshman taking AP classes because of the lack of other challenging classes. This seems like intellectual laziness on the part of the administration (or perhaps a lack of adequate funding for curriculum development.)</p>
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<p>Some AP classes are appropriate for freshmen though. Our school has a social studies sequence that included Human Geography, World History, US History, and Government/Economics. All are offered at the College Prep, Honors and AP level so freshmen are eligible for those classes. When my oldest son was a freshman they did not offer AP Human Geography and I did not find that the Honors class he took was significantly different from the AP class that his brother took.</p>
<p>There are also a handful of kids in our school who are 3 or 4 years ahead in math. Those students are sometimes ready for AP Calculus as freshmen. They are not the norm but they do exist and part of the reason those kind of kids wind up in private schools is that public schools in south Florida can be very rigid in their curriculum and they do not make exceptions easily.</p>
<p>The vast majority of freshmen are not ready for the vast majority of AP classes. However, there are some kids who are ready that early AND there are some classes that are appropriate for younger students. </p>
<p>IMO schools design curricula that serve the vast majority of students well. However, the best schools allow the outliers to be outliers and accommodate them. In my area the public schools do not accommodate outliers. There are a few IB programs, but they are all in dangerous schools. The rest of the public schools in this area have AP classes but do not accommodate the top students. </p>
<p>I have a little bit of a rant about public schools in this area. I used to teach in a pubic school so I have firsthand experience. The public schools encourage as many students as possible to take AP classes. As a result the teachers pile on unbelievable amounts of work in those classes. It becomes a grind and not at all like a college class. </p>
<p>In my kids school AP classes have LESS work than other classes. In AP History students have to read. There are class discussions. There are essays. There are tests. No projects. No busywork. Science classes have written lab reports and tests. Math classes have tests. There is homework but it is not graded. Students do as much or little of the homework as they need to do for themselves.</p>
<p>It is interesting that people on this forum constantly talk about how much WORK there is in AP classes. My experience is that AP classes are much less work than honors classes but that there is a much more personal responsibility for learning. My kids like AP classes because there is so much less busywork and project work compared to honors classes. In their school the peer group is not that different between honors and AP as most of the top students take a mix of honors and AP classes.</p>
<p>They may want to limit them because they may be less rigerous and easier to get an A. Additionally, the A which is given out to most/all of the students (because all AP students are supposedly the best) is worth 5.0 - further exacerbating the grade inflation problem</p>