What's the deal with AP courses in high school?

In My Humble Opinion
21

In terms of the recent history of AP, one reason for the courses’ popularity is that around the turn of the century, Newsweek started rating high schools based on the number of AP tests taken per capita as the sole measure of a high school’s value.

So naturally, administrators and teachers had a massive incentive to convince more students to take more AP tests, and hence prepare for them by taking more AP courses (though it should be noted that the students don’t need to get a certain score on the AP test to count for the rankings - just taking the test is sufficient, on the theory that schools should be challenging students).

So that’s what the signup emphasis is about. But, are the courses good for students? Two examples close to me:

SunSon, now 21, took AP Calc his junior (AB) and senior (BC) years. He got a 5 on both tests and ended up not having to take any math as a collegian - though he decided on a math minor and is taking his third and final college course in fulfillment of those requirements. He’s always liked math and it proved a good match for his interests.

SunLass attended a selective public high school which pushed AP a great deal. The freshman year social studies and science courses were AP Human Georgraphy and AP Environmental Science, two courses that were normally taught in a semester in high school but could be adapted into year-long courses at the AP level for freshmen. After that, most of the AP test curricula were available at various levels in her school; between AP US History, Government, Psychology, Statistics and a English class offered as dual-enrollment with the local community college, she ended up with enough credits to start college this fall classed as a sophmore, skipping the intro psych courses for her major. She is highly motivated, self-starting, and knows how to take time for herself and have fun with friends even while carrying a tough academic load - so in many ways, the ideal AP student.

Now: in any situation with high-stakes testing, there is going to be pressure to teach to the test and encourage student regurgitation. If a school loads students up with tons of courses, there may be not as much learning going on.

I’d encourage any student to give at least one AP course a try early on in high school, in a subject that interests them, if they have the option open. Hopefully by the time senior year rolls around your student will have some idea of the workload involved and be able to gauge how many and which AP courses would be good to take. It’s a nice option to have for a student who is precocious in one area, so they can explore it more in-depth - I tend to think a lot of high schoolers are good enough in at least one thing to be able to take a crack at college-level work in that area before graduation.

22

I don’t think any AP teacher really makes a secret of the fact that we’re teaching to the tests. And no, that’s not ideal… but they are actually rather good tests, that do a good job of measuring understanding, such that teaching to the tests of necessity involves a good amount of general level of understanding of the material.

23

You mean the ACT and SAT?

It seems unlikely anyone could score highly without the AP Classes and that effects the chances of getting accepted into a college.

The trouble is that knowledge will mostly be lost if someone graduates high school and gets a job. They want to go to college ten years later (age 28). They won’t remember much high school Chemistry or Calculus.

A student needs to know their plans by their junior year. Take AP classes if they want to attend college after graduation.

24

Typically, AP classes have little relevance to ACT and SAT. He is referring to teaching to the AP tests and the AP tests aren’t the type of tests that if you score a 3-5 you are ignorant of the subject. The AP tests, at least in the liberal art subjects, were significantly more difficult than what I encountered in freshman/sophomore liberal art classes.

25

Thank you @octopus

26

Around here, many AP classes are eligible for dual credit at a community college; whether they have to pay tuition or buy or rent books depends on the district. Sometimes, they are also scored on a 5-point scale which can account for things like a 4.35 GPA.

27

My high school didn’t offer any AP courses while I was there (1999-2003). They did have honors courses. Apart from the course listing on the HS transcript I don’t know if there was any difference.

The closest thing on offer were “2+2” credits granted by the nearby university. Some of the courses you took in high school could be converted to an equivalent college course (e.g., 4th year English to WR 121, or trigonometry to MTH 112, etc.). The student paid 50% of the normal course fees to obtain these credits. There was a bit of a scandal in the end, though. The university backed out of the program, and all the credits became generic “division transfer” credits. They could count toward a total credit requirement for college graduation, but not toward any particular course requirement.

In my case, my parents were not convinced it was worth the cost in the first place, so I guess we didn’t lose out in the end.

A friend of mine who wanted to get a leg up in college admissions just plain registered for actual college math classes that he took while in high school.

In my case, despite graduating HS with a 3.9+ GPA, I did terribly in college and flunked right out. I wonder if AP courses in high school would’ve better prepared me for the college workload. In the end, it was another 13 years before I’d return to college.

28

My kids took several AP classes in high school and passed most of the exams with 5’s, which was good enough for their universities to give them credit. I have a vague recollection that one or both of them still had to take a basic biology course because that was the major she was going into, but I’m not sure.

My younger daughter was having a very rough time the year she took AP Calculus, and the teacher allowed her to drop the class and be an aide that period instead of staying on the roll and failing because she wasn’t turning in homework. She took the AP Calculus exam anyway, and she passed it with a 4.

29

I only took AP history, which helped get me out of a general ed class. My friend look many AP classes which helped him graduate early.

30

Thanks to everyone who weighed in, this is very helpful.

He’s a good student, our expectations are that he take all honors classes and get A’s in most of them, and he’s handling that, while still having a life outside of school. He’s not on an accelerated track, but is taking the honors level of what 10th graders would be expected to take.

I feel good about where he is, doing legitimately well in challenging coursework. College is still a TBD, not whether he’ll go, but where and for what.

I’ll encourage him to talk to kids he knows who have taken AP courses, and get a sense of how they work in our HS. Seems worth it to give it a try in Junior year.

31

Perhaps part of this is wrapped up in the phrase ‘no child left behind’ with the reality that everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses and thus different levels of challenges are needed. As it’s no longer PC to have a ‘retarded’ class (retarded used in the literal sense here), it was necessary to retard the common classes to allow all students who are capable of independent studies to attend and pass. This seems to bring additional distraction into the classrooms both from the additional help some students need and behavioral issues some cause. But that commonly doesn’t work for students who excel in those subjects, and actually that can be damn boring for them, so the AP classes seem to be the old ‘regular’ classes to that extent.

And as such it appears more colleges don’t credit AP classes as counting towards their requirements.

In my school also AP classes get bonus points added to their GPA, which I do feel unfairly hurts students in the normal classes by skewing the schools GPA higher than it should. And due to this kanickid’s classes are mostly AP or honors. We have also found out honor’s classes and AP classes have the better teachers and a less distracting student behavior.

32

I took a full year Calculus class in high school and scored a 5 on the AP exam. It placed me out of one semester at MIT. I took the AP Chemistry test on a lark (As I recall it got me out of something I didn’t want to do due to scheduling.) I hadn’t even taken AP Chemistry just regular Chemistry and scored a 3 which go me no credit

33

OIder Child won’t be in high school until next year, so I’ll know more then, but I’ve heard from other parents that part of what is going on is that the College Board has made a whole bunch of AP tests, way more than when I was in school… as far as we can tell, just to make the College Board money??

For example, when I was in school there was AP Physics C, which was calculus-based and reasonably like a first-year course you might take in college for a technical major (if you weren’t taking the honors courses which tended to have some linear algebra and multivariate calculus), and AP Physics B, which was not calculus-based but which was reasonably like a college physics course that, say, a pre-med might take. Now there is also “AP Physics 1” which has as co-requisite Algebra II, which is supposed to be more of an “introduction to building physical intuition” than a proper math-based course and… is there any college that will give you class credit for AP Physics 1? No one I’ve talked to knows of any. There is no point to this course being an AP course at all.

Also, there is apparently now AP Precalculus. Come on now.

34

My daughter-in-law had enough AP credits that, with a couple of summer courses she was able to graduate college in three years. Since she would go to med school, this was significant. So for her it was good.

On the other hand, when it comes to AP calculus, at McGill we have a separate section of calc 101 that follows exactly the same syllabus as the course for students with no calculus. It was one hour a week shorter, but otherwise the same. The problem is that their background was just cookbook; get through the problems, but no real explanation (aka “theory”).

When I was in HS, in my senior year (1953-54) we had an early trial of what came later to be called AP courses. There were four, math, English, history, and physics (the four standard senior courses). But you had to be in top 5% of the class to take all four and in the top 10% to take two. I was in the 13 percentile. So I didn’t take calculus until my 2nd year of college. Three years after that, I was a TA teaching calculus, so I don’t feel I missed anything.

35

As I recall things from my high school era (1988-1992) we only had the option to take AP English and AP Calculus in what was a “medium-sized” city. I only took English.

I also remember some tests in other subject that were from the same people behind the SAT and/or ACT (being in Wisconsin, I took both) that weren’t “AP” but used for something or another, but in the end, on my college transcript I only got automatic credits for an English course by getting a top score on the AP English exam, which was the whole point of the “Advanced Placement.”

36

Possibly SAT subject tests?

or maybe CLEP tests?

37

I graduated from high school in 1969, and though it was an immense place with the best test scores in NY besides the specialized high schools, we only had AP Calculus and AP History. Extra Honors English was also officially AP, I think, but since I was going to MIT I never even thought about taking the test. I got a 5 on the history test, but got no credit for it. I skipped the first term of Calculus thanks to the AP test, but so did half of my MIT class.
Why there are so many AP tests should be obvious. ETS makes money from each one, and I suspect they are an easy sell to schools. My current school district has limits on who gets to take honors classes, but anyone can enroll in an AP class, so they are popular. My AP teachers were great, but if coaches are teaching calculus, I wonder how the standards are enforced.
BTW Achievement tests are on high school level material, while AP tests are on college level material. The History Achievement test was much easier than the History AP test, though neither were particularly difficult.

38

I can’t believe I missed this thread. This is my thing.

Background: I have taught AP classes for 20 years. My main jams are AP English Lang and AP Macroeconomics, but I teacher AP US Gov and have taught AP Micro, AP English LIt, and AP Human Geography. I’ve served several years as a question leader for AP Lang, which means selecting the samples for scoring and preparing/training the people that train the teachers who do the scoring. I’m a College Board consultant and contractor in two different roles. I also teach at a pretty intensive STEM magnet where most of our kids will take 15-18 tests before they graduate. So there’s a lot I know about here.

I’d like to correct some random pieces of information, and explain some trends. In no particular order:

It’s been a long, long time since “number of AP Tests Taken” played a major role in US News rankings. Those rankings now have a great many factors, including things like state tests. For AP, tests passed counts 3x as much as tests taken, and basically the most any one kid can do to help your ranking is take and pass four AP exams in 4 different disciplines (like, Math/Science/English/Social Studies). Washington Post may still just count tests taken per kid, but no one cares much about those.

One practical note: College Board sets the standards for the AP tests and them. They contract with ETS to write and score the tests. ETS and College board develop them jointly using College Board’s standards (this gets really confusing. I know test developers working for either. I know test developers who have worked for one, then the other, on the same test).

There is always this perception that fewer and fewer schools take AP credit. This is not really true. College Board puts a lot of effort into making sure colleges and universities are willing to take AP credit. They do this by making sure the test development committees have college professors on them and by “seeding” AP questions into real college class assessments. They then run statistical analyses on how students do in the course as a whole and how they did on those items. Finally, they involve college professors every year in the process of determining the cut scores for specific tests.

There is this related idea that AP tests aren’t really as rigorous as a “real” college class. College advisors are terrible about this: they all the time will push kids into re-taking classes they have credit for. I think some of it is a well meaning desire to make sure that kids do well, and some is a self-serving desire to pad out Freshmen classes with strong kids. More broadly, I think the problem comes from 1) people not remembering how little they actually learned in Biology 101 or whatever and 2) a misunderstanding of the scoring system. AP tests are scored on a scale of 1-5. They are very clear that a 3 is equivalent to a C in a college course, and they have the statistical data to back that up. Well, people who make Cs in Freshman Bio or English 101 or Macroeconomics also don’t actually have a fantastic grasp of the subject matter, and also would be well-served to retake the course if they are going to go to a higher level in that discipline. A 5 is the equivalent to an A, and in my experience, that generally tracks pretty well. I’ve sent a lot of students to highly selective schools where they tested out of courses with 5s, and they did fine. Every college professor has stories of kids who didn’t, but confirmation bias plays a huge role there. There’s plenty of students who make As in Gen Chem who hit a wall in O-chem, as well.

Generally speaking, I think the AP tests are pretty good. The economics ones are fantastic. AP Lang is very solid if you understand how it works and what it’s looking for. Generally, the more standardized a course is at the higher levels, the better the AP Test because they have a strong consensus regarding what anyone who took that test should know/be able to do. It’s the less common courses that cause problems: when they went to build AP African American studies, they collected 100+ syllabi from Intro to African American studies courses (this is the standard procedure) and there wasn’t a single common text found on even 30% of them. This is why you can take AP Psych in Florida but not AP AAS: at the end of the day, College Board could prove virtually all Psych intro courses have a unit on Gender and Sexuality, but they couldn’t make anything like as strong an argument for any one component of AAS.

Over the last 20 years, there has been a big push to expand access to AP tests. This is extremely controversial. College Board holds (and I tend to agree) that even a student who “fails” the test is still better prepared to take the same course in college than a student who was in a regular class, or took an unrelated elective instead. The courses are certainly aligned with what colleges teach. If you google “ap course and exam description” for any subject, it’s very clear what’s in each course. In many, many cases this is far superior to a class that is mostly focused on preparing kids for a state exam that only really assesses if someone is qualified to graduate high school. There is a criticisim that College Board is trying to increase revenue, but I think this is countered by the fact that College Board subsidizes AP Exams for students on free or reduced lunch, so they only cost $53 (as opposed to $98). So many of the students affected by “expanding access” and “open enrollment” are not exactly generating a lot of revenue. $53 cannot be much above the break-even point for many tests. (Side note–States often apply additional subsidies, and districts may apply their own. We don’t charge students for exams).

There’s also a lot of snobbery involved. People like the idea of AP classes being exclusive. In many cases, they can almost be a school-within-a-school for the “good” kids, and often that means a school within a school for white kids. So I am all for open access and increasing enrollment. Another part of it is a genuine disagreement of what an advanced class should be. School-based “honors” classes 30 years ago were often billed not as places for working harder and learning more, but more like places where you worked a normal amount, but you learned more because the class wasn’t being “held back” by weaker students. That’s not AP. AP is more like “Everyone is going to work harder, but you are going to learn a ton.” It’s the material that is advanced, not the kids.

I think the purest example of this sort of thinking has been the complete fucking meltdown a lot of people have had over AP Pre-Cal, which debuted this year. All the smarty-smart kids are so derisive of this: “Pre-cal? that’s like a sophomore class! Ugh! Why didn’t we get AP Linear Alg instead?”. But the reality is, there’s tons and tons of kids sitting in college classes with names like “College Algebra” or even “Pre-Cal” who will never need to take calculus. It would have been wonderful for them if they could have taken AP Pre-cal their senior year and tested out, or gone into college math with a stronger background. CB has been very explicit that the course is NOT designed for kids on track to take Calculus in high school: it’s designed for kids who take Alg in 9th, Geometry in 10th, A2 in 11th and, now, AP Pre-cal in 12th. A lot of those kids used to just not take a math senior year, and then took pre-cal their first year in community college and flunked out. Providing a test for those kids is fantastic.

I’ve personally never had a problem with covering the course as designed, and if kids weren’t mastering all of it, that’s fine. They will get a 1 or 2 on the test and go to college more prepared than if they hadn’t taken it. I think that’s all positive. My grading scale doesn’t have to mirror what they would be getting in an actual college class with that same level of mastery.

Another really great aspect of defining a course as advanced content, not as being for advanced students, is that you can slow it down (or speed it up). So we have a 100% pass rate on the Calc AB exam, even with mostly 1st gen immigrant kids, mostly taking the test as sophomores. Our secret is no secret: we double block the class. This means that we are covering one semester of college content in effectively two years. People hear this and, I swear, they get angry, like we cheated. I swear, they are like “What? Anyone could pass calculus if it was taught like that!”. Well, yes. That’s the point. And it’s really cool because now they can go on to take BC and Stats and we have fantastic retention when they go on to college engineering programs. But people get mad because what they wanted to hear is that we only take really really smart prodigies.

As far as “let kids be kids”, well, for one thing I don’t think 16 year olds are kids. No society has ever been wealthy enough to let 16 year olds be non-productive. Here, we have them focus on their education so they can be more productive later–but if we weren’t doing that, they’d be working. It’s okay to expect 16 year olds to be busy.

I do think that things need to be evaluated in their full context, and it’s a problem if taking all AP classes is seen as something all “smart” kids should do. At a school I was at years ago, they would make noises about limiting the number of AP classes a kid could take. But they never talked about limiting the number of extracurriculars, or even taking that into account. In fact, the attitude was almost like “You can’t expect this 3-sport athlete and newspaper editor to also take a full set of AP Classes. It’s not good for his mental health. So we need to put a cap on them”. But for some kids, taking a full set of highly advanced classes IS their 3 sports. But there was this sense that the 3-sport newspaper editor was such a paragon that if anyone could take all the AP classes, he would have to, as well, because that’s what paragons do. And that’s not good for his mental health, so everyone needs to be blocked. No one ever wanted to talk about a rule that you couldn’t be a 3 sport athlete. I think that how much a student should be doing should be evaluated as a whole.

Our program only takes 100 kids a year out of 8000ish 9th graders in the district, and we make it very explicit that it’s only for kids who see it as an opportunity, not an obligation. You don’t have to take 18 AP exams to be prepared for college. We aren’t looking for the few who qualify, but for the few who want to try this. And for them, it’s great. But no, it shouldn’t be the norm.

Clearly, I can talk about this forever. But I will shut up now.

39

Thank you so much for taking the trouble to post this informed, thoughtful article.

40

Not only did my rural high school not offer any AP courses when I graduated from it in 1970, but it today offers only one AP course, a U.S. History course. It perhaps didn’t matter as much in 1970, since AP courses weren’t as common. I suspect that if I had mentioned the idea of AP courses to anyone at the high school (including teachers, the principle, and the guidance counselor), they would have said, “Are you making that up, because I’ve never heard of it”. It appears that my high school doesn’t even offer calculus. Basically the high school didn’t then and doesn’t now expect anyone to go anywhere better than a second-rate state university and do anything better after college than teach high school. For a lot of the students there, wanting to do anything more than that shows that you’re a snob and a traitor.