Ed. Note: The previous version of this story stated that top-rated liberal arts colleges only rarely give course credit for advanced placement test scores. However, it was later ascertained that many top universities (including Williams, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia) do accept a range of AP scores for course credit. The story has been updated to be factually correct.
Advanced Placement in American high schools has become an enormously popular trend, boasting an annual participation of almost 2 million students taking classes in the more than 30 available subjects.
The perceived advantages for students taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses are that they have the opportunity to show their mastery of college-level work to college admission officers and are also able to skip a broad array of introductory level undergraduate courses in many colleges -- providing that they achieve a grade of three or higher on a year-end exam (scored on a scale of one to five). Over the years -- to a great extent because of these "advantages" -- high schools in New York City have ramped up their AP programs.
Over the past decade, however, a growing number of important and influential dissenters have openly rebelled against the trend. They include the Independent Curriculum Group, which is an alliance of "leading college preparatory schools that emphasize site-based, teacher-generated curriculum for advanced courses." The ICG's primary initiative is to eliminate all Advanced Placement from high school curricula. The group contends that AP forces teachers to conduct superficial and mechanical survey courses. They argue the frenetic pace required to cover all the material on an Advanced Placement year-end exam leaves no time for the flexibility and in-depth topic studies conducive to more effective learning. Fieldston, Riverdale Country, Trevor Day and Berkeley Caroll are among the New York City elite private school members that have dropped AP courses.
But don't AP courses help students get into the college of their dreams? And would some of New York's top private schools put themselves and their students at a disadvantage solely to preserve the integrity of their own courses? Not likely. So what's really going on?
The schools rejecting AP classes have finally acted on what they had recognized for a long time: AP not only restricts curricula that is vastly superior when decided by teachers in the classroom, but is also a hindrance to submitting a top-notch college application by draining too much valuable time from studying for the SAT and preparing for other courses.
As was discussed in my last post, "Preparing for the SAT," adequate preparation for the SAT requires intense study over many months. Most selective high schools in New York City recommend their students to take the exam in the spring of junior year and, if they are dissatisfied with the first score, gain in the fall of senior year. The majority in New York City takes the exam at least twice. In addition, most students will have to sit for two SAT II subject tests. Like the SAT, they are normally taken in the spring of junior year and the following senior fall semester. While all of this is going on, schoolwork remains extremely demanding as 16- and 17-year-olds navigate the most significant transcript semesters of their high school experience. So, when one to three AP exams -- which are punishingly demanding in both scope and difficulty -- are thrown into the mix, students are ready for a meltdown and rightfully so! Advanced Placement classes can change the spring semester of junior year from challenging to impossible.
While the College Board advertises that one of the benefits of enrolling in AP is to place out of introductory courses in college, top-rated liberal arts colleges -- e.g., Williams and Amherst, and Ivy League schools -- have extremely high standards and often require departmental exams to verify a student's proficiency in a particular subject despite top AP scores. And after "doing business" together for decades, college admission officers are intimately familiar with New York City's selective high schools. They know what earning an "A" in any class means at Riverdale Country as opposed to Trevor Day, or at Stuyvesant in relation to Bronx Science. Adding an AP to a course designation makes very little or no difference. New York City high schools that have dropped AP courses are trailblazers that deserve high praise.
There is no doubt that many more will follow.
Randy Miller: Universities and School Districts Need Greater Curriculum Alignment
Rick Ayers: Constructing the Achievement Gap
Mike Piscal: Let's Add SAT Scores Into the Mix When Holding High Schools Accountable
Ethan Klapper: Why Advanced Placement Classes Are a Good Decision
Learn About Advanced Placement Program AP Exams and Courses
AP Central - Advanced Placement Scores, Courses & Exam Center | AP ...
Take a look at the AP International Diploma page and click on the AP International Recognition link to find universities that take them. Some of the email contacts are outdated, but if you go to the universities that they show, you can look at their entry requirements and see.
Also got me out of intro calculus, which was a mistake I never
really caught up from in the umpty subsequent engineering math
classes. Also got to bag a chemistry and physics intro course.
Not bad for classes I had to take in high school anyway (in New
York at the time, these were an option above Regents and
General tracks). The AP English class I and my cohorts took
was a full time, year long, regular class only it was taught by
the best English teacher. No fakery there.
I guess this education profiteer doesn't like them, but they were
mostly an upside for me. Hell, what's a semester hour cost these
days? And you get out of 3-4 per AP class, maybe more if you
ace the test (why I got out of two, not one, English courses).
The real crap is "preparing for SAT". School and paying attention
is supposed to do that. Cramming later might get you in somewhere.
Plenty of people selling hope and a cheat sheet out there. But a
real course where you, like, learn stuff will be a lot better for you.
Admissions people know AP classes are harder and taking them
shows willingness to put forth effort. Maybe that means something
to them.
But I'd skip a school that refused to honor the credit. You betcha.
It can only be a sign of further screwing-over to come.
But here we are.
It's a very simple decision. If you think intellectual advancement is of worth, encourage your students to take AP courses. If you think it's a misuse of time, then by all means, don't. Your children can find other things to fill their time, just like Thordeer.
College intro classes are not in depth by nature. Students who take AP courses miss nothing.
I see nothing wrong with lauding the benefits of AP's money saving advantages . If you don't think high schoolers are ready to bare some of the responsibility for their own future, just when do you plan on teaching them this important lesson? Some parents believe adolescence should be a carefree time and enjoyed as long as possible. They have my full support in raising their kids the way they want. I viewed adolescence as a transitional period to adulthood. It was a time when I gave my children more freedom but also more responsibility. Because of their AP courses, I figure they paid for 25% of their college tuition, with their father and I paying the other 75%. It made the notion that they were 100% responsible for their own lives by the time they graduated from college a readily accepted and understood concept.
“From the NYT, December 2009...
Students who graduated from college in 2008 with loans carried an average debt of $23,200 — an increase of nearly 25 percent, or $4,550, when compared with those who graduated just four years earlier.
I
Being smart is great, but being smart and a quarter won't buy you a cup of coffee. If you don't put in the study time, you're not going to get good grades. There's a reason why the smartest kids don't always make the best grades in a class. Kids who have the self discipline it takes to study will likely be very successful regardless of their undertakings.
There is a great deal of evidence that Dual Enrollment courses, in which students take actual college courses taught by high school teachers in their high schools but for both high school and college credits, are of great benefit.
AP course are HIGHLY overrated.
My son, in 11th, LOVES the challenge of AP courses. I think it is great that high schoolers can have a course where the results are standardized, rather than teacher dependent (where they may be more subjective).
ap classes are the genral study classes freshmen and sophomores have to take to get to higher level more specialized courses in the same field of study. the intensity of the study regimen is an aid to taking the sat not a hindrance as the courses serve to tune the mind.
I did that.
In this economy, with college tuitions so high, I would encourage every capable high school student to take a couple of AP courses, to save money.
There are colleges that don't use the SAT as an admission criterion, but that test is a general overview of logic skills. An AP class is advanced study of one topic.
It's illogical to have to spend $8,000 to re-take a college course that was mastered in an AP class in HS.
Public universities are more likely to accept AP because it saves the student and the state money.
And the argument that AP takes away from time that could be spent studying for the SAT is just weird. Really? Even the people who administer the SAT caution against giving the scores much weight in admissions, and study after study shows that the SAT is mildly accurate at predicting 1st year grades, but nothing else.
For most schools the AP exams offer good structure and the sad truth is that few teachers are qualified enough to even teach at that level and even fewer students are prepared for those classes. (Therefore I also have little respect for teachers complaining they are somehow too good to teach intro level college classes. APs are already above their pay-grade. Who do they think they are tenured professor's?)The rate of students passing the AP exam with a 3 or higher is low. Passing the AP actually does prove a lot about the preparedness of a student for college work that GPA and the SAT doesn't.
The class is basic, so I'm sure some find it too structured. But to appreciate something more specialized, the basics are helpful.
But I'll take with a large grain of salt the opinions of a person who makes his living selling test-tutoring services.
As it happens, I scored 800+800 on the SAT back in 1965. (I did take the test twice -- I only got one 800 in my junior year). Nineteen years later, I got 800s on all three parts of the GRE.
I mention these results not to boast, but to remark that they happened without any kind of tutoring. In fact, I did no preparation at all for the SAT, and my prep for the GRE was a couple of hours of looking at logic puzzles in their what-to-expect brochure.
Now, once upon a time, I was pretty bright, but the keys to scoring well on the SAT or GRE were simple: (1) a broad English vocabulary; (2) basic arithmetic skills; (3) critical reading ability -- that is, the ability to extract meaning from what you read; (4) deductive and inductive logic.
With the exception of (2), these are things you acquire over time, not by short-term intensive tutoring. I'd guess that the same is true of AP tests -- you have to actually understand the subject, rather than have it force-fed.
So, tutoring for AP tests is probably not a profitable enterprise. Hmmm.
I agree as what is needed - English was my second language begun in earnest at age five (thank the Good Lord for spell checkers). I tested "slightly retarded" at age 8, noted that the test was all vocabulary at age 10 and began to memorize a dictionary (thank goodness there was no oral exam!). By High School I was the smartest kid and by the end of High School I was either the smartest kid in Illinois or tied as the Illinois Statewide gave the highest score in all areas (logic was never a problem - and only vocabulary directly and via killing the meaning of the logic problem ever held my scores down).
The AP system for me - and for my kids - just messed up college. Teachers would say you were exempt from part one of a course, then tell you that you could not take part two because they teach different topics in the first part so you are not prepared for the second part.
The article is spot on - let teachers teach the subject - not teach to some test.