<p>I call them advanced payment classes. My kids call it buying a better GPA. The school won’t weight your grade unless you take the test. I’m not sure what the overall AP pass rate is, but I know that it’s very rare for kids to pass the AP stats exam. The teacher is awful. I found that most colleges that said they give AP credit in their catalog, did not give AP credit once the student was enrolled. I think a lot of kids at our local high school are more concerned about bumping up their GPA than passing the test.</p>
<p>Having a bad teacher is indeed not an excuse to do poorly on AP exams. I’ve taken 14 AP tests and self studied several exams (English Lit, US History, World History, Japanese, Spanish Literature) receiving 5s on all but Physics B (I didn’t care enough about the subject). I’ve had my share of bad AP teachers (chem and stats especially) but some amount of studying will always get a student a 5.</p>
<p>The biggest problem on the humanities/history tests is students not answering the given question but writing generally about the topic. This is almost guaranteed to get a 2 or at best a 3.</p>
<p>Well, my son had a terrible AP stat teacher at a very good boarding school (she only lasted a year there) and he got a 2. He had neither the time or interest to self-prepare for the exam. It simply didn’t matter.</p>
<p>Our school system pays for the exams. Kids are strongly encouraged to take the exams. If they chose not to, their final grade is dropped by one letter grade. So they take the exam but since they’re not paying for it, failing it is not a big deal. Lots of kids take AP’s to get the gpa boost/look good on transcripts for college. Passing the exam may not the highest priority.</p>
<p>Note that “Students may not receive AP credit for an equivalent course taken at the University of Maryland or elsewhere. If students earn credit in a course equivalent to an AP exam for which they also earned credit, the AP credit will be deleted from their records.” This type of policy is not unique to University of Maryland.</p>
<p>MOWC, Back in the day I wrote about Dickens and Hard Times (which I’d read for English) and got a 5. What people here don’t see to realize is that if you have a truly lousy teacher who never gives you a test using AP materials, and no one tells you to look at a review book, you may not realize how woefully unprepared you are till you get into the exam.</p>
<p>As for me, I got an A in Calculus, and was generally good at math, I somehow totally freaked out theday of the exam and only got a 2. I took calculus self paced at Harvard and got an A, which included finishing the final exam before anyone else in the class. Sometimes you just have a bad day.</p>
<p>I don’t know if this a bragging point or not, my kid managed NOT to pass a single AP test in senior year. Did it affect her college GPA? NO. My guess is senioritis. Second kid will not take so many AP tests in senior year.</p>
<p>This is going to sound like senior citizen crankiness about how much easier it is for young whippersnappers nowadays, but back in the day there weren’t any review books for AP tests. </p>
<p>I’ll second mathmom about having a single bad day. One of my high school classmates blanked out during one of our AP exams and just froze. Those of us sitting nearby were sympathetic, but couldn’t really help. He still ended up going to a school in that nice northeastern athletic conference, and then made an enormous fortune on Wall Street. So it all worked out in the end. :)</p>
<p>Last year (and the year before), about 33% of Calculus AB test takers failed the test, roughly double the rate from ten years before. The fraction getting an A equivalent on the test has stayed the same or drifted up. The number of people taking the test has almost doubled in the last 10 years. I think a reasonable conclusion is that many more people are taking Calculus AB who need it on the transcript but don’t particularly care how they score on the test.</p>
<p>BTW AP tests are not scored so as to set particular percentages of test takers to get a 5, or to make the mean score a 3. These means, and the percentages, can drift or change quickly and significantly (see above).</p>
<p>I second davidthefat. At my school, about 50% of people that take AP classes tend to do so for the GPA boost (5.0 instead of a 4.0), and when exam time comes, they opt to take it and they end up failing.</p>
<p>My AP Chem teacher’s average score for the 2010-2011 school year was a 1.7.</p>
<p>S1 took 7 AP’s never studied for the exams and passed them all.
S2 took 2 AP’s didn’t pass either of them but took 2 dual enrollment classes at the CC that transferred to his college. The school district paid for all AP exams and the CC courses S2 took. So there was no performance pressure.</p>
What people here don’t see to realize is that if you have a truly lousy teacher who never gives you a test using AP materials, and no one tells you to look at a review book, you may not realize how woefully unprepared you are till you get into the exam.</p>