-{This post was ported over from Hit Coffee}-
John T. Tierney gives the case against AP tests:
AP courses are not, in fact, remotely equivalent to the college-level courses they are said to approximate. Before teaching in a high school, I taught for almost 25 years at the college level, and almost every one of those years my responsibilities included some equivalent of an introductory American government course. The high-school AP course didn’t begin to hold a candle to any of my college courses. My colleagues said the same was true in their subjects.
The traditional monetary argument for AP courses — that they can enable an ambitious and hardworking student to avoid a semester or even a year of college tuition through the early accumulation of credits — often no longer holds. Increasingly, students don’t receive college credit for high scores on AP courses; they simply are allowed to opt out of the introductory sequence in a major. And more and more students say that’s a bad idea, and that they’re better off taking their department’s courses.
The scourge of AP courses has spread into more and more high schools across the country, and the number of students taking these courses is growing by leaps and bounds. Studies show that increasing numbers of the students who take them are marginal at best, resulting in growing failure rates on the exams. The school where I taught essentially had an open-admissions policy for almost all its AP courses. I would say that two thirds of the students taking my class each year did not belong there. And they dragged down the course for the students who did.
The AP program imposes “substantial opportunity costs” on non-AP students in the form of what a school gives up in order to offer AP courses, which often enjoy smaller class sizes and some of the better teachers. Schools have to increase the sizes of their non-AP classes, shift strong teachers away from non-AP classes, and do away with non-AP course offerings, such as “honors” courses. These opportunity costs are real in every school, but they’re of special concern in low-income school districts.
To me, the most serious count against Advanced Placement courses is that the AP curriculum leads to rigid stultification — a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry. The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superficially. In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual interest. The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.
Michael Williams talks about his own experience, concurring.
I personally do not have any experience in the way of taking AP courses. As far as my school district was concerned, I was closer to “remedial” than “advanced” despite my being a top performer in most of the (non-honors) classes I took. In middle school, my math teacher inquired about putting me advanced math, but was denied on the grounds that I had been tagged a near-remedial student (I was actually making mostly A’s and the rest B’s at the time, but that wasn’t what they were looking at). Honors classes were out of reach in high school, and AP classes moreso. The colleges took a different view, and I was being recruited by a directional school specifically for their honors college. Southern Tech, where I did attend, accepted me unconditionally into its Honors College.
When I got to Southern Tech, they had me take a placement course. This wasn’t for college credit, but was for bypassing the sequence as Tierney mentions. I scored into the highest English and Math courses, though it turned out not to matter: The Honors College required that I start at the bottom floor in English and the College of Industrial Technology required that I take specifically designed “technical math” courses, which were not appreciably different than the sophomore and junior high school classes I did take. I could see why I otherwise would have tested out of them.
I am, on the whole, glad that I did not take AP classes. It may not have done me any good for math and my Honors English classes were awesome. The only ones I would have wanted to test out of are those that I might not have (namely, science) and ones I would have (Social Studies, English) are ones I was glad to take at the collegiate level.
Tierney points to what I consider to be some solid reasons why AP classes have gone off-track, as far as that goes. On the other hand, some of the same arguments can be used against tracking (Honors/Standard/Remedial/etc) and I am a fan of those. The bit about intellectual curiosity comes is interesting because my impression from my friends – many of whom took honors classes – were that it was much more freewheeling than the classes I was taking. Without thinking about it, I would have guessed AP classes would have been the same. But if the class itself is geared towards preparing for a specific test, I suppose that makes sense. It does seem a little bit odd to me that the best teachers would be teaching these classes, though. I’d have thought that teaching to a test is something that they would avoid (and, along those lines, that non-AP honors classes were considered better because the framework was not as rigid).
I don’t really have anything to say, but as a college prof I do appreciate hearing this perspective.
My own experience taking AP classes was very positive, but there’s a couple of factors that probably influenced my experience. First, I graduated from high school in 1992, so the same circumstances do not necessarily hold as they do for Tierney. Second, the Denver Public School district paid for all AP exams (provided the student who wished to take them got at least a “C” in the corresponding AP course), although I think 1992 was the last year they did so. Getting the exams paid for by others who were not me was a great boon, and I think without that bonus, the exams might not have been worth it.
Here are my experiences:
I was able to test out of most of the basic entry-level classes and core requirements, and I got sophomore status. This meant that I had more freedom to choose which classes I wanted to take and it meant I was earlier in line for registering for classes (at my university, the more credits you had under your belt, the earlier you were allowed to register). I probably could’ve graduated in 3 years (more likely, 3 1/2 years) with these extra credits, but I stayed on the whole four years because I had not much else to do and I had a four-year scholarship and I liked to take classes.
Some of my AP classes were probably much more challenging than the corresponding college courses would have been, although it’s hard to know since I didn’t take them. I do remember thinking during my first year of college that it was so much easier than my last two years of high school as to be almost ridiculous. This might have been a function of going to a state school, and although I was in the “honors” program at my state school, that seemed to me to mean, in practice, that we got more personal attention from our professors and were therefore more likely to receive higher grades.
I will say that I probably would not have passed the AP physics exam (which wasn’t offered at my school) if I had taken it, but that I passed introduction to college physics (the course that a high exam score would have given me credit for) with a B that was probably more generous than I deserved. I did take the AP Chemistry exam and didn’t pass (i.e., I wasted taxpayer money) because it was too hard and I not only didn’t prepare myself well, I also wasn’t good at Chemistry. This suggests to me, again, that the exams are not necessarily the easy passes that Tierney might suggest, although he seems to be focusing on the humanities and social sciences.
I will also say that a large number of the introductory American history and Western Civ courses I have taught or been a TA for seemed far less rigorous than I remember the AP exams or the AP classes I took being. History, however, might not be the best example. You could take five of the same semesters of an introductory history course, taught by different instructors, and have very different experiences–read different things, learn a different set of facts outside of the obligatory things that have to be taught. In that sense, maybe the AP exams do enforce a certain conformity, but they also permit the truly curious student to expand on those basics and take more involved classes, if the student so chooses.
Sometimes the credit colleges offered for exams didn’t make a lot of sense. A couple examples:
First, for a 5 (highest score) on the French, Spanish, or German exams, my college granted credit for only the first semester of that language, which is where you learn how to say “how are you?,” “what is your name,” and “Where is the pencil/pen/notebook/cat/dog/pomegranate?” Doing well on those exams, in my opinion, should place one at least a year higher. My college, however, did allow students to take a (free) language placement exam, and I suppose anyone who truly knew their stuff on the AP test would presumably have no problem placing within spitting distance of where they needed to be.
Second, for a 3 (barely passing) on the AP European History test, my college exempted one from the first half of Western Civ, or basically Ancient History through the middle ages, but not the second half. The exam, however, covered only the Renaissance through modern times, at least when I took it. So in my mind, the college ought not to have exempted that class at all. (A 4 or 5 on the exam earned an exemption from both Western Civ classes.)
As for the “opportunity costs” Tierney talks about, he’s probably right but I don’t know the solution. In my high school, “honors” classes and AP classes were the same “track.” You had to take, for example, a year of honors history, or three years of honors math, in order to take the AP courses. (At least that was the official line. I learned later that strict tracking was technically illegal–or at least someone claimed to me it was. If that’s the case, then perhaps anybody could take AP courses and my high school simply made it seem otherwise. Still, if one didn’t have the math background, it seems to me that it would have been difficult to take calculus.)
I think there will always be the problem of how many resources a school should focus on those with the highest aptitude for academics and those with lesser aptitudes. This doesn’t mean that the AP system doesn’t make things worse, but I think that’s part of larger discussion. My school “tracks” were “honors” (or “x,” for “accelerated”), “college bound,” “regular” (my school probably had a different name, but I don’t remember it), and something like “remedial.” The x track students like me were treated very well, especially if we took mostly x classes (some people took only, say, honors English or honors math and science, but a small number took honors everything that was offered).
When I was a TA, I encountered–and I suspect the same is true for Tierney and probably James Hanley–students who came to me, not understanding a low grade they received, saying “but I got a 5 on the AP history exam.” That sense of entitlement (I did well in the past, so I deserve a good grade now) can be discouraging and frustrating, but it’s not much different from the student who says “I’ve gotten all A’s in college so far, so it’s unfair for you to *give* me a B on this paper.”
Well, this has been a long comment. Thanks for hearing me out.
Thanks for making most of the comment I was going to. I graduated around the same time and had the same positive experience from AP (30+ credit hours granted)
From my personal experience? AP classes were better than non-AP classes (they covered, in general, college level material over a slightly longer timespan), and the costs of passing an AP exam were a lot less than taking the class in college. OTOH, I passed something like 30+ hours of AP classes with 4s and 5s.
I then proceeded to goof off and fail out of college, requiring a second freshman year. (or second sophmore year). A lot of it depended on the teacher. I felt my english and math classes were college level and well taught. My history not so much. My physics very, very well done. (The teacher in that passed out a college textbooks and started assigning mechanics problems until enough people dropped out. The mechanics stuff was remedial from the year before, but he wanted only the serious students to take it).
However, my son has a different option than AP — he can take “dual credit” classes. Wherein he is either bussed to, or a professor from, a local college teaches an actual college class. He passes the college class, he gets college credit AND high school credit. I find that far superior, if a bit more costly, than AP classes.
Our local school district still has AP classes — so far the dual credit classes are only offered for some classes (I know Cal 1 and 2, as well as government are on the list). English and a few others are still AP. I only know why English isn’t offered dual credit — most 12th graders take the entire senior year to get their writing up to English Comp 1 and 2 levels.
They’re just not quite…mature enough writers..to pass college classes. (There’s always some, but not as many seniors can write at a college level as can do Calculus at a college level. Writing is, apparently, hard).
The dual credit idea sounds interesting. One thing I wouldn’t have liked for the AP exams–if I had had to pay for them myself, that is–is the uncertainty attendant with the exam. Someone could have been a serious, well-performing student all year and could have even mastered the writing skills necessary, but simply tanked it on the exam and been out a few hundred bucks (I assume that was/is the cost….I don’t know).
I think what you say about comparative ability of calculus vs. writing has a lot of truth to it. At the same time, I imagine that writing is harder to measure than mathematical aptitude/skill. My (admittedly limited) teaching experience has taught me that if you give me forty papers on the same topic, I can rank them pretty reliably from worst to best in a way that most people who read the same papers would agree with. But taking one paper in isolation and trying to figure out why it is or isn’t good writing is very hard, and it’s difficult to test for in ONE BIG EXAM.
You have to pay for the dual credit class too. In the end, if you want college credit — you gotta pay for it. Admittedly it’s not all-or-nothing with the dual credit stuff, but I didn’t find the AP tests all that terribly difficult. At that point, you’re used to a lot of big-stakes tests. That’s a lot of your last two years of high school. (PSAT, SAT, ACT, whatnot).
I like the dual credit classes insofar as it gives high schoolers a taste of (admittedly generally minimum) college level standards for an entire year or semester.
I had a lot of friends that found college level math and science classes (especially physics) ridiculous because you’d have three or four tests worth 80% or more of your grade. That’s pretty high stakes right there, and they weren’t used to it. (My physics teacher in high school, as noted, taught like it was college class. The only reason 90% of our grades wasn’t tests was it was against district policy. He had to make it 50% tests, 25% projects, 25% homework, I think).
Projects were fun. He’d generally rig up something like “If I have a spring of coefficient X and length Y, a stuffed animal of height Z, how much does the stuffed animal have to weight so that if I attach it to the spring and drop it, it just touches the ground at maximum extension. Give me the answer as a formula”.
The whole class of us (all 8, I think, at that point) futzed with it for 4 days. On Friday, he got his bungee cord, a stuffed animal, ran it through the formula, stuffed it with lead shot until it weighed the right amount, then we went out and dropped it. And that was our project for mechanics of springs. 🙂
We shot tennis ball cannons and a few other projectiles too. That was pretty much his pattern — teach the concepts, give us a large homework assignment from the text (everyone having different problems), the last week of the unit was setup as a project that we had to solve on paper and then test, and then a test on the material. Was fun.
Guy was actually pretty well known in Texas. I was visiting A&M my senior year in HS and one of the physics professers there just enthusiased about him.
I took a number of AP courses and their tests, including the higher version of the Physics and Calculus test. This was 1989.
I can’t speak for every AP course everywhere, but the AP Calc course I had was correspondingly as difficult as Calc I and Calc II at my university, and my AP History instructor in high school was a demon.
I can see how teaching to the test can lead to the description offered here, but this is a complex problem; if you’re letting kids into your AP class that aren’t legitimately ready to be there, and you have a culture of passing people who don’t necessarily deserve the grade, you’re going to have to firehose test passing material to the class in order to get most of them to get a 4.
So they get a 4, but they’re not really a 4-level student of U.S. History (or whatever), they’re a 4-level student of “Passing the AP US History exam”.
I think you can lay a lot of this at America’s culture of exceptionalism. “My kid is smart, he can take AP classes!” != “My kid is capable of college level learning”.
Concerning history, I had two different experiences. My European History teacher had very high standards and made us live up to them. My U.S. History teacher was more touchy-feely, get-together-in-a-circle-and-talk-about-America person. I did well on both exams, but felt I learned very little from the second teacher, and I suspect (although I don’t know) that the students from the European History class were better prepared than those from the U.S. History.
And of course, there are strategies to do well on the exam, especially the multiple choice version, that might mean a high-scorer simply mastered how to take the test.
Many students take AP courses because they yield higher weighted GPAs & suggest to college admissions officers that the student is a “go-getter”. Unfortunately, the grade inflation phenomenon operates across the board, resulting in lower standards for all course in virtually all schools, including AP classes. Even admission into AP courses has become easier, allowing even average students who would not have been admitted in previous generations.
There is also the problem of the dirth of high school teachers who are intellectually and experientially equipped to teach genuine AP classes. Many of these teachers operate with the new grade-inflated standards, giving high grades to students who will ultimately get low scores on the standardized AP exams. Why would anyone think that most AP teachers are prepared to teach college level classes? Colleges of education notoriously have students with the highest GPAs (obviously the most inflated) in comparison with students in all other major fields of study in their respective universities. Simultaneously, education majors, on average, perform far lower than any other discipline on the GRE exams. Having taught in a college of education for a few years, I became well aware of these unfortunate facts, and I’m afraid that the trend has only worsened with the passing years.
I can’t speak for other states/districts, but in ours you got the GPA boost from taking honors classes with or without AP.
I was waiting in particular for Professor Stillman here. Today, it looks to me like three quarters of the high school students I interact with are in some kind of Honor’s and AP track system. It no longer seems like much of an honor, it’s so diluted.
In the late ’80’s I got about the equivalent of college US history in my AP class. I wound up helping a friend struggling with history and saw the equivalence. Idid not take AP English and benefitted greatly from my freshman composition class, which I otherwise would have bypassed. My AP American Government class did not allow me to bypass basic political science classes in my major, forwhich I was retrospectively grateful. I needed the foundation in actual political philosophy to address material that came later in my upper division coursework. These were the only AP classes my high school offered.
I will second Prof. Stillman’s remarks regarding grade inflation. (One more data point: at my [private] high school, AP and honors classes were weighted, so that, if I remember correctly, the same “raw score” would give you a 3.3 in regular Physics, a 3.5 in Honors Physics, and a 3.7 in AP Physics. I hope I’m remembering that correctly.)
In my experience and that of my classmates in high school, AP classes were much more about signaling than about earning credit or placing out of introductory classes in college. (I for one had a 4 in AP Calculus AB but still chose to take the first course in the calculus sequence [~ differential calculus] when I got to college, and I am glad I did.) The message was simply hammered into us, by teachers and guidance counselors, for years: good AP scores, and AP classes on the transcripts, look good for college applications.
From the perspective of a college admissions office (and here I’m guessing), AP scores are an objective measurement with which they can compare students from vastly different backgrounds. An admissions officer may have trouble comparing a 3.5 GPA at Public School 303 with a 3.5 GPA at Old Dead Guy Grammar School and a 3.5 GPA at Xavier High. But a 5 in AP Euro is the same no matter where the student went.
I wonder if some of the adverse effects noted by Tierney could be alleviated by increased reliance on, say, the SAT II Subject Tests? You still probably have a lot of the same problems with conformity, teaching to the test, etc.
My AP Calculus teacher taught in the local community college.
In senior year, I took plenty of courses in the local community college.
They all transferred.
my AP biology class covered absolutely freaking everything. We got into a bit of graduate level stuff. Complete fact-based course. (5 on the test)
my AP physics class was NOT designed to teach AP physics, but the teacher privately tutored me so that I could pass the test. (5 on the BC)
gotta 5 on the ap english, still can’t write terribly well, but I don’t think that courses are terribly good for teaching that in the first place.
My grades were calculated in such a way that I would only have not been the valedictorian if I had gotten B’s and C’s on most of my high school classes. This is the result of “nearly” skipping a grade (only had english with my own grade).
I took AP English (Language and Literature both) and found it extremely valuable. The regular English courses at my school were pretty basic and tedious (read the book, identify the parts of speech, answer questions to make sure you read the chapter, find similes and metaphors, learn the symbolism in Animal Farm [at least that one taught me about the Russian Revolution two years before I took twelfth-grade History]). In contrast, grade 11 Honours English (where we took the English Language AP exam) and grade twelve AP English (where we took the English Lit AP exam) taught me how to write a strong essay, which was applicable to English or to any other subject; how to evaluate a book in greater depth that ‘what are the themes’; and how to understand the ways in which authors write and communicate information (how does using this word instead of that one strengthen a given passage). They also gave me exposure to a vast amount of wonderful poetry that I would never have encountered in a regular English class. And, in addition, it did allow me to get credit for first-year university English courses without taking them, and thus avoid having to pay for those courses at university. When you compare the cost of a high-school AP course to the cost of university classes, it’s an excellent investment.
My school also had AP Calculus, and virtually everyone who took that found it valuable.
The course certainly didn’t squelch creativity – in both honours and AP we had assignments that required us to evaluate novels and plays of our own choice – nor did coverage feel superficial. We covered a greater diversity of literary forms than a typical English course does, but we had time to discuss all of them. We did spent a fair portion towards the end of the course going over past AP exams to understand how to do well on them, but that wasn’t the main thing I took away from the course, and the core of how to do well on an AP exam is “read at least one major Shakespeare play and know it well” and “understand how to write a strong argument and perform good literary analysis” – and the latter I had already learned from the course.
Might a first-year university English course have been even better than my AP one? Maybe, but I highly doubt it. First-year university courses range from 40 students to 100-200. My grade 11 AP course had maybe 20 people, my grade 12 one around twelve. We got much more time to discuss things with the teacher and ask questions, and much more time for individual participation and discussion. Nearly all of the undergraduate papers I’ve seen are worse than the ones I wrote as an undergrad, so I highly doubt that I lost out by not taking the university English course.
It’s not surprising that a lot of people don’t pass the AP exams; they’re extremely challenging (especially when you’re taking them in grade 11). But even if you don’t, the value added from having that course instead of a regular English one is enormous.
I took AP Calculus, Biology and two years of AP English. Got 5s on all and started college as a sophomore – well worth the cost of the tests.
I was also better prepared for Calculus II than most of the other sophomores that had taken Calc I at the university (in fact, I made some extra $ tutoring them). This may be because I was at a state university with a very good engineering program, so calculus was essentially a ‘weed out’ course with 100+ students per prof split among 3 grad student TAs, half of whom spoke English as a (distant) second language. My AP Calc, by contrast, was 20 students taught by a teacher who regarded us as her favorite class and went above and beyond to make sure we all understood the material (no one in the class scored less than a 3 and more than half got 5s).
AP Biology was also outstanding. The teacher had a MS from Harvard in the subject and encouraged us all to do independent research projects well beyond the usual anatomy and biochemistry of the program. Two of those were the basis for entries in a national science scholarship competition – a proposed design for artificial muscle and a study of factors influencing success in artificial insemination (this was almost 30 years ago). No freshmen biology course at anything below Ivy League could have come close.
I got out of freshman and sophomore English requirements, so I have no idea how those would have compared. Of course, I’m an engineer, so while I enjoyed the Western and World Lit. study in the AP courses (and would have slept thru standard HS English), the required courses in technical and scientific writing (for which AP biology had been excellent prep) were the ones that mattered for me.
Now, I took those courses in 1983-84. We got no extra grade bonus for AP, only the chance to earn college credit. Also, I was in a town with a small sub-Ivy League college and professors’ kids tended to take AP, so we got extra resources from the college that many high schools probably did not.
For me, it was very worth while. I know I was bored to tears by HS American History and regret not taking the AP class – I would at least have had something beyond the Civil War before entering college.