It’s not an unwritten assumption. I have experience in education research and the College Board research is widely respected, even among rivals. Their bread and butter is college acceptence, and college acceptance comes from proving their students are more likely to suceed, and the people who need convincing of this are education experts at universities who have no problem at a tearing apart a weak study. Needless to say, they control for motivation- looking, for example at AP versus homegrown honors classes, or at schools where every student takes AP classes (including presumably the unmotivated ones.)
They have a product they are selling, for sure. But it’s not some kind of conspiracy, and it’s actually a pretty good product that has brought advanced education into schools, including under-resourced ones, that otherwise wouldn’t know where to start.
The schools that don’t take credit are generally top-half private schools. They aren’t taking JC credit, either. However, they do weigh AP credit when making admissions choices, and the kid with no AP classes and a bunch of dual-enrollment credits is a less attractive candidate than the one with a bunch of AP classes–even if they earned 2s.
On the other hand, state universities, which do take JC credits, will also take AP credits just fine.
One of my sons’ insistence on taking AP US History Sophmore year was a huge mistake. He was not ready for it at that point and the demands of the class brought down his whole course load’s grades that semester … dramatically. He was warned though, by teachers, advisors and parents alike, to wait another year. And his hubris checked he regrouped and has done fine, doing very well in a fine college now (academically like a kid in a candy store).
That said I am a big believer that a student should be in the level of class that challenges them optimally, whatever level that is, AP or other. Overall I think my kids who have been through it so far (one to go) have been better off in the long term being in classes that challenged them even though it negatively impacted their grade points in each case. Getting in the most competitive school is less important than being able to get the most out of the school attended and those classes prepared them well. (Funny enough while that kid did poorly grade wise in that class he still got a 5 on the AP test. Go figure.)
This article investigates whether college admissions decisions are reliable for students who haven’t taken the SAT or ACT and certainly targets the CollegBoard’s bread and butter. I realize the article doesn’t address the AP program, but I think it is germane to the discussion. While I may be a bit jaded, I don’t think the CollegeBoard is involved in any kind of conspiracy. Some of the things they do, they do very well. When in the right hands (a good teacher) their product is a quite good. One of the problems I see is their unbridled enthusiasm to push more AP classes and enroll more AP students in schools where there are too few resources to adequately support them.
I thought of three ‘top-half’ private colleges and visited their admission pages on their websites. Here is what I found at Univ of Southern California,Stanford and Northwestern
For Stanford - here is what is posted on their website.
Incoming freshmen are allowed to transfer a maximum of 45 quarter units (roughly one year of full-time college or university study) to Stanford. All credit evaluations for enrolling students are completed by the Office of the University Registrar on receipt of official college transcripts or score reports
I don’t know if you think these three schools are ‘top-half’ private colleges but I think they are pretty good colleges. They all accept transfer credit up to a certain number. Northwestern will only accept AP credit with an exam score of 5. The AP test score is 1-5, five being the highest possible score.
I think that’s reasonable for a college to accept only a minimum score because if a student scored lower it could indicate that they did not fully master the material therefore need to take the course again. I went to a less academically rigorous college so I think scores of 3 and above were accepted for course credit.
I still think it’s worth it to take AP classes (Or IB- International Baccalaureate- no one’s brought that up yet) for all the reasons already discussed. If it’s not right for a student, the student will quickly figure it out. I’m guessing though that a college would prefer a student who took APs and ended up with a 3.5 GPA (ETA: Even if all those AP courses don’t translate into college credit) over a student who took all “regular” classes and got a 4.0. If a student went to a school that offered AP classes but opted to take junior college classes instead, I can see how a college may find that a bit odd, but I don’t know that** much about college admissions.
ETA (again): And on a purely practical level, in most school districts AP classes are free right? And you’d have to pay tuition to take junior college classes. Why pay when you could get the same thing (or possibly better) for free?
It’s not odd at all. In fact, my state has an articulation agreement with the community college system where high school juniors and seniors can take community college classes and receive both high school and college credit.
It is free to take AP classes in public high schools though the exam costs money. Community college classes here cost about $350 for a 3 credit class. Some of the reasons a student might opt to take a class at the local community college - the high school AP teacher is not good, the high school does not offer that particular class (AP or otherwise), student wants to ‘experience’ college, the credit will transfer to the college the student plans to attend as long as the student gets a ‘C’ or better (a final exam score will not be used to determine if college credit is awarded).
When I went to the University of Arizona I found that while they theoretically accepted AP credits, they accepted them as some genericized elective credit. The only exception was, as I recall, English, but you still had to take two years of English, you just took 103/104 (or the accelerated one semester 108H) instead of 101/102. So you could get a bunch of credits, but they didn’t really mean much. Usually majors would require 120 credits, but about 100 of them were “earmarked” anyway (“has to be from the physics department”, “has to be a tier 2 humanities” etc), so the genericized “AP Credits” that transferred ended up not being worth much.
All those schools accept at least some AP credit, and I count “Only taking a 5” as “taking AP Credit”. According to your own cite, 90% of Northwestern students get some sort of AP Credit, which suggests that the kid that opted for dual enrollment instead is not even there, making questions about transfers immaterial. And actually Northwestern takes a 4 or 5 in most everything.
The sorts of schools that don’t take AP credit, period, are pretty much the Tier I–and not even all of those–and you aren’t getting there without being involved in some sort of significant advanced academic study in high school. At that level, all the schools basically reserve the right to individually assess your transcript and cherry pick out what they want to give you credit for.
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Furthermore, they only take transfer credit at all from true transfer students–they have to be earned after you graduate. Harvard’s website makes it clear that transfer credits have to come from a daytime program where you were enrolled full time for a year, and :
Northwestern makes it clear that for a course to be considered for credit, it must
So, again, no dual-enrollment will be counted. This is pretty standard at top private schools–even the ones with liberal policies toward AP credit.
California is a slightly different animal because there’s been a lot of work in that state to keep their JC program rigorous, consistent, and aligned. But if you transfer into Stanford with 30 hours from Mid North Eastern Oklahoma Cow College, credit would be far from automatic.
Still, it is very difficult for me to imagine how a kid who is reasonably able and capable of taking AP classes takes the JC route instead and ends up at a top school. I mean, if you went straight to the JC instead of finishing college because it interfered with your Olympic practice schedule, or because you are a genius in a little bitty town with a one-room school house and trekking over to the JC one county over starting at the age of 12 was the only way you could get any education at all, then maybe. But if you are a suburban middle class kid enrolled in a great school with a solid, challenging program who opted to go dual credit for no exciting, compelling reason? Those are the sorts of 2400s that the top schools love to reject.
Back when I was in high school, my school didn’t offer AP Physics, and in retrospect, that’s a good thing. I’m quite confident I would have gotten a 5 in it, but the actual physics class I took in college did cover more than the high school class would have, and I’d have been missing out on those topics, which would have put me at a disadvantage for further classes.
On the other hand, in any subject other than your primary one, go for it, and you just might get a few of those annoying first-year classes out of the way. If possible, though, have some idea of what college you’re going to and what courses they require: For instance, my 4 on AP US History would have been good enough to skip the course, except that the history course my college required was World History.
Are you sure they would have counted? When I did it the AP Physics curriculum didn’t use calculus. Even if it counted as an equivalent class at my college (it didn’t), any prospective Physics major had to take the version of the classes with calc making it useless as anything other than a year or two long study guide for the course you’d actually be taking.
I went to an IB magnet high school that also offered AP courses. I took AP US History, AP Statistics, AP Biology, and AP BC Calculus courses and exams and also took the AP Language and AP French exams based on IB course preparation. I wound up with mostly 5’s and a couple 4’s on the exams.
My impression was that AP courses had a lot of breadth, but little depth, and you were very conscious the whole time that you were aiming for an exam at the end. Hence, there was a lot of test prep which I found annoying. The IB courses had much more depth: you did “pre-IB” courses in grades 9 and 10 and then did the core IB subjects in 2-year sequences in grades 11 and 12, for the most part. I found them much more difficult and much closer to what I did in college than the AP courses. And there was much less emphasis on teaching to the test.
AP classes got me out of the math, foreign language, and English 101 requirements in college and opened up more space for electives, but I felt that educationally I got more out of the IB courses.
It looks like I confused things by bringing up transfer credits. I only brought up transfer credits as it applies to first time freshmen entering college.
MandaJO, I think its important to understand that there are a great many students who are not enrolled in suburban, middle class great schools with solid and challenging AP programs. In many areas, the local community college can be a great way to augment what the public high school can’t or wont offer.
Maybe the OP isn’t enrolled in a ‘Tier I’ college and never wanted to go to one. It is MHO that AP classes are only as good as the teacher and that taking college classes in high school can be a great opportunity for many students.
While a growing number of private universities don’t offer credit for AP classes, they certainly do take them into consideration in admissions. In surveys of admissions officers, the number one, absolute top most important criteria for admissions-- above grades and test scores-- is rigor of curriculum. You will be assessed as to if you are taking the most challenging curriculum available to you, or if you are taking something less than that. And they won’t be particularly impressed with the argument that it’s not worth taking the hard classes because you don’t get credit.
So why are schools not giving credit for AP classes? The cynical answer is that they are feeling the financial squeeze and aren’t benefiting by giving people free credit. The less cynical answer is that as good as they may be, an AP class at BFE High School isn’t really equivalent to a full class at Harvard. And for all the work that the College Board does, this is true.
I got a semester and a half worth of AP credit (U.S. History, Spanish language, Spanish literature, and English - I took the English exam without taking the actual class because the one section of AP English didn’t fit my class schedule, but I passed anyway). My university accepted my test scores, which were all 4s and 5s, but I had to take their English composition class anyway - 2 semesters. I got elective credit for that. But the Spanish exams meant that I could take more interesting literature courses in my major (Spanish) instead of having to take more grammar and composition classes. Plus graduating a year early saved a ton of money.
It’s not for everyone, but it worked well for me.
I don’t know about other universities, but Harvard University does grant Advanced Standing based on AP scores. However, your APs only count for credit for this if you take Advanced Standing (and graduate in three years), which most eligible students do not. On the other hand, Harvard doesn’t really care if you take prereqs in general, though; you can often skip entry-level classes whether or not you’ve got an AP score to back it up. Of course, if you can’t hack the upper-level class, you’ve only got yourself to blame…
That being said, in my experience, classes at a place like Harvard are not at all equivalent to an AP class or a 5 on an AP test, as even sven says.
I went to two high schools. One had an AP track. The other did not, but there was an “advanced” track that did not teach to the test and after which one could take the AP if one so desired. Both had their advantages. The AP track was at a less academic high school and gave the chance to do more rigorous work with a defined curriculum that we knew we’d learn. The advanced-track school had better academics and didn’t need that defined curriculum nearly as much.
College courses, of course, are also as good as their teacher. Indeed, a bad college teacher (and many community college classes are taught by adjuncts of dubious quality) can do a lot worse than a bad high school teacher, who usually has more structure and oversight to their classes.
Admissions officers have access to information on what types of courses are available at an applicant’s high school. They aren’t going to ding the kid who’s school didn’t offer AP classes, and they will be impressed with that kid showing initiative by going to a community college course. But they definitely won’t be impressed by a kid who has a wealth of AP courses available and chooses to take a less rigorous route.
Oh, I know. As mentioned above, I’ve been teaching AP courses in Title I schools for over a decade, and I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly (and the quick and the dead. . . ). There are certainly plenty of individuals I’d counsel to go to the junior college, or even to drop out entirely and go to junior college full time. Early Colleges can also be a great alternative.
What I am sensitive to is the idea that AP courses are not practical, somehow, or that they are only for the middle class, suburban kid. That putting a rigorous, interesting, complex and nuanced AP course into an urban Title I school is putting pearls before swine, and since the best those kids can hope for anyway is an associates degree, and the certainly can’t pass an actual AP test, it’s better to start them at the junior college first thing where they will get the nominal credit no matter if they learned much.
The 3 or 9 or 18 hours of credit you may or may not get is really beside the point, IME. What matters, deeply, is that a kid leaves high school academically prepared for a rigorous college. IME, again, on average AP courses do that better than, on average, junior college classes. Individual instances and circumstances vary widely, of course.