This comment by a reader called Montana Teacher continues a discussion of the value of AP courses. My observation: AP courses are a big money-maker for the College Board, which on its face is nonprofit, but aggressively pursues opportunities to generate revenues, like claiming that access to AP courses promotes equity.
Other posts are here and here.
Montana Teacher writes:
“Thank you for all of your comments on AP. I have several observations from my experience in our high school:
–The AP curricula is strong; however, it is not the ONLY curricula. For example, what the College Board has chosen to emphasize in English (such as tone or rhetorical devices) is perfectly fine, but this is just one way to teach English. I find that, in our school, the weight given to AP squelches our abilities to teach in other, creative ways. At my liberal arts college, the beauty was that each professor was stunningly unique, and that made learning so exciting. It makes teaching exciting, too.
–If the AP course is truly being taught at a college level, then the teacher should have a college-type schedule in order to handle the preparation and paper grading. In other words, how can a true college-level course be taught by someone who is teaching six periods, five days a week? This isn’t fair to the students if the teacher can’t keep up–or it’s not fair to the teacher, who is asked to do too much.
–If the AP course is truly being taught at the college level, then these high school kids who take many AP classes are being overloaded and over-stressed. To not be overloaded, students are forced to choose between too-easy classes or too-rigorous classes. Why not have just-the-right-amount-of-rigor classes so students can take every subject at that level, and not be forced to sacrifice one subject for another?
–How can college credit be given in courses that are taught by people who do not have master’s or doctorate degrees?
–Why do colleges accept AP credit? Isn’t this a money-losing proposition for them? How did this ever get started? I suppose that colleges fear losing students.
–The two-for-the-price-of-one mentality is permeating everything. It seems that everyone I know is in favor of dual credit classes, often to improve economic outcomes, not educational outcomes. This must be due to the high price of college . . .
–Lastly, where is the discussion on what is developmentally appropriate for our youth? Freshman English was a marvelous time in my day to read, discuss, and explore at a time when one was away from parents in a new place with a real professor–we were developmentally ready to read and write and wonder and grow. I am saddened that many students will not have this opportunity because they took “college” English as a 16-year-old.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, AP courses helped my son by decreasing his actual overall cost in college. He went into college a second semester freshman which gave him the flexibility not to take such demanding courses his first semester. It allowed him to get used to college life. It means that for students of color they are able to acclimate to social and psychological environment that is vastly different from the one of their high school. So, equity comes into play when kids don’t come into college at a deficit. My son is of color. He will be graduating in the Spring from Calpoly with a degree in software engineering.
The job of teaching is not always what’s fair to you but the students you serve.
I’m wondering. How much credit did your son receive, and by how much did he decrease his or your costs? The research suggests that your son is an anomaly….the fact is that most kids who take Ap do not receive much credit for it, nor do they graduate in a shorter time period.
I agree with every point the teacher from the big sky country makes. We now have freshman taking AP Human Geography. There might be one 14 year-old out of 1,000 who could handle a genuine college course but even that one student would still be having his/her freshman experience despoiled.
AP is sucking up the title I money that should be going to helping schools in poor communities; at almost $100 a test. Schools are using these federal dollars to pay 95% of the cost for qualified students (free and reduced lunch status qualifies).
I really enjoyed teaching AP physics. This year I had both the valedictorian and salutatorian in my class. Both of them were taking five AP classes and neither was that involved with school activities. They will be just fine but they had their high school experience diminished by the perceived need to earn college credits.
There needs to be some form of control put in place. AP took in about $1000 on just my two students. It is not likely that a “non-profit” organization with many many six digit earners and even seven digit earners is going to limit its own intrusion into high school life.
I think 1 AP class a school year should be the maximum. Sports, theater, dances, student government, music and other school activities are important to developing the whole child. The push for AP is harming rounded education.
I don’t know why Human Geography is even an AP class — Does any college actually offer credit for it? You mentioned one of the APs that is least respected (which is why many frosh and soph take it).
More colleges give credit for APs in math and science. Or allow students to place out of a class. And many only accept a 5 or a 5 or 4.
And the colleges that give college credit for a 3 on even the least respected APs are very likely offering their own intro level classes that are not particularly better.
Many colleges accept AP Human Geography as a lower-division social studies credit.
The APHG curriculum is actually really good. It covers a lot about social justice and the treatment of minorities (linguistic, ethnic, religious, etc.) around the world.
I find it a really nice overview of a lot of the world, and my students have discovered that many of the subjects we cover in class appear again, in such diverse subjects a history, biology, and statistics.
Sorry to hear the 14-year-olds in your neck of the woods perform at such a low level. Several hundred freshmen at my school take Human Geography every year, and well more than half are capable of college-level work. Some are like I was so many years ago, reading at a college level as early as the 6th grade.
One AP class a school year should be the maximum, you say. Most of my sophomores take both AP World and AP Psychology. They manage this without undue hardship, many of them participating in sports, band (now that’s a time suck!), student government, etc. Then they go on to take several more AP classes each year as juniors and seniors, knocking out the first 30 or more college credits by the time they graduate. They are not gloomy automatons missing out on high school life. Good gracious, where do people get these ideas?
Just curious, what do you mean by “reading at a college level as early as the 6th grade”? Because some standardized test told you that? I too was told that I was reading at a “college level” when I was still in elementary school (based on a standardized test). Boy was I in for a rude awakening when I actually arrived at college and took a gander at the material I’d be reading – no way could I have done that in sixth grade (could barely do it as a college freshman). Few if any could. What a standardized test is actually capable of “measuring” [sic] and the demands of the real college world are two entirely different animals. There is simply a vast difference between the depth and nuance of what a sixth grader or even high school freshman can comprehend and analyze vs. that of a college freshman. To think that someone who takes AP classes in high school is getting the same experience as someone who takes a college level class is just ludicrous.
Many of the brightest graduates of my middle school go on to the local high school and take AP Human Geography in 9th grade. Universally they report it to be a dull class. I’m curious to know why.
Dienne –good points. I had the same experience. It goes to show the faux authority of many reading tests, as well as the reality that there is no all-purpose reading comprehension ability. The kid who breezes through Harry Potter or a video game manual may be utterly stymied by Dostoyevsky or a tome on Brazilian agrarian reform.
“Advanced Placement”
College ready by seventh grade
Bachelor’s in eighth
Doctorate by ninth is made
Isn’t AP great?
SDP – your poem reminded me of that old TV show Dougie Howser, MD – about the 16 year old doctor (obstetrician, if memory serves!). How frightening that anyone would think that would be a good thing.
Dienne,
Originally, it was “College ready in Kindergarten”, but it appears that some folks have become much more down to earth.
But yes, Doogie Howser was very frightening — to say nothing of very annoying.
Ponderosa
There is nothing I would rather do than curl up in a comfy chair with a good tome on Brazilian agrarian reform
ponderosa – I am curious about this. Our high school currently does not offer Human Geography and a couple of enterprising students are collecting signatures and going before the school board to ask that it be offered. Knowing the kids involved, I can pretty much guarantee that it is not for college credit or beefing up their resume reasons. (One kid my son describes as “super smart but doesn’t do that great in school.”) I think they are truly interested in the topic. I should make sure that they have actually looked at the curriculum. I would hate for their excitement and activism to be for naught if the course ends up being boring.
As for reading levels, I 100% agree with Dienne. Just because kids can read the words and understand the meaning of individual sentences doesn’t mean they understand the book. I’m thinking of books I read in middle and high school that I then had to read again in college – Madame Bovary, Lolita, Romeo & Juliet. Yes, I understood the gist of the stories when I was younger, but I didn’t get a lot of the nuance because I just didn’t have the life experience. I imagine if I read these books again as a middle aged person, I would get even more out of them.
As I librarian, I can’t stand when teachers tell kids they have to read books at a certain lexile/reading level. This makes no sense to me, and has little to do with the content of books. One of the best Young Adult books ever, Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, is rated at 600, which is determined to be a higher level 3rd grader or a low level 5th grader. Do you really want a 3rd grader reading about abuse, alcoholism, death and adolescent displacement of a nerdy Indian growing up on the reservation? By the same token, to deny this book to a 10th grader because it is below their reading level means they are not exposed to a great book that speaks to their age group.
Susan,
The really great books can be read by people at different ages, well into adulthood, and continue to become richer with each new reading.
Diane
I immediately thought of Huck Finn when you said that.
Our society seems to have become obsessed with numbers and ranks (many of which don’t mean anything) and AP is just the latest manifestation of that obsession.
These are not legitimate college classes. They are high school classes taught in high school classrooms and the peers are all high school kids. No college peer effect to be had.
Sure you can teach kindergartners to read and do math, but that does not make it a good idea. They need play time and socialization time and self-discovery time. Academics is just not developmentally appropriate.
If you put high demand classes in high schools, the kids will do them but they will be missing the growth time appropriate for their age. AP is part of a concept that I believe pushes kids ahead of their developmentally appropriate level and does way more harm than good.
Agree, Tracy. I have found the same thing. The vast majority of my AP students are ready for the work and the challenge. I teach freshmen, and many of the kids I get have been so bored for years. This allows them to really “step up.” It’s huge for them.
And I’m sorry to hear that some students are finding APHG “dull.” It’s a really great class and my students LOVE it. I am often told by former students that it was one of the best classes they have ever taken. I’m really passionate about the subjects, so maybe there’s the difference.
I’m not a huge fan of the AP test itself, but the CLASS is terrific! The students and I have learned so much, and I am amazed how many world events link into the curriculum.
Threatened Out West,
I think you nailed it — whether an AP class is engaging or dull is probably more about the teacher than the curriculum. Perhaps it also has to do with whether it is a class of 35 students who aren’t particularly interested in the subject or a class of 25 who are.
Whoa, wait.
“Several hundred FRESHMEN” at your school take “both AP World and AP Psychology??”
What school is this and where is it?
Students at your school routinely “knock out the first 30 ore more college credits” by graduation?
What school is this and where is it?
Her last point is my favorite. There is a dearth of education leaders who truly understand the mind’s development and its proper order of operations (what goes first, second, etc.). I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I know that having kids do “close reading” in kindergarten is crazy. As the writer suggests, it might make sense to have high school students just read and comprehend a lot of literature before getting into hard-core college-level analysis. I tend to think mere comprehension of a novel or poem is underrated. If it’s comprehended well, the mind naturally begins its analysis of it inwardly albeit perhaps in rudimentary form. Immediately forcing kids to turn these rough thoughts into graded written assignments may be premature and counter-productive. In general, I think there are phases in education, and in general I think the elementary school (and maybe even high school) years should be focused primarily on learning about the world, not reading skill drills or tons of analysis. “Elementary” means “time for the elements” –i.e. the building blocks, not the finished product. Cognitive science shows that there are bursts of brain cell growth in the toddler years and in early adolescence. What gets learned at these times is the stuff that gets learned best. We should seize these opportunities to give kids a solid library of built-in vocabulary –“glacier”, “toxin”, “litigation”, “mitochondria”, etc. The essential building blocks of literacy. A broad base of words and ideas is the only true foundation for reading ability, listening ability and writing ability. The NCLB legislators’ logic of “do the basics (i.e. reading and writing) first” sounds reasonable, but it’s entirely backward. Learn about the world first. Without the vocabulary and knowledge this gives you, good reading and writing and thinking about the world is impossible. The NCLB and Common Core logic says, “make great readers and they can acquire the knowledge they’ll need when they’re 18”. Wrong. They can’t become good readers without knowledge, and they won’t have time to undertake the slow process of knowledge accumulation once they’ve entered the work force. Where are the wise heads who really understand the order of operations?
In many high schools, AP courses are given an extra grade point, so that an A is worth 5 points instead of 4. It often leads to students loading up on AP courses at the expense of other courses that don’t offer that extra grade point. Courses like performing arts, newspaper, yearbook, which might offer valuable experiences to HS students. I think it leads to a weird kind of “academic anorexia” in which students can operate on the assumption that their GPA is never high enough.
I think it leads to students missing out on other valuable experiences that can never quite be recovered later on.
I have encountered a number of colleges that limit the number of AP courses accepted for credit, or don’t accept AP courses for credit. At best it maybe substituted for placement. In other words, maybe a student can demonstrate having met a language requirement by passing AP Spanish, but they still have to take other courses at the college to meet their graduation requirement.
WDF1,
Good points. Esp “academic anorexia”
Jay Mathews of the Washington Post asked me to post this comment that he wrote:
The two teachers from Montana and California express views that are widely held. AP is not the only curriculum, but sadly I have discovered in 30 years of reporting that it is very difficult to maintain the rigor and depth of a course that does not have an independently written and graded final exam as AP and IB have. I think that is important because most of our high schools are underachieving, with the average high school student doing less than an hour of homework a night.
And as the teachers say, many students take a lot of AP tests, but if you had interviewed as many such students as I have, you would find that for almost all of them it is their choice. They prefer AP because the teachers are usually better, the subject deeper and more interesting, and their friends are there. Most such students that I know do lots of activities in addition, and like that too. They would be seriously aggrieved if a school tried to limit their free choices in such matters.
And it should be kept in mind that these are college-level courses, but only at the introductory level, what you get as a college freshman. I have watched 9th graders in an AP human geography course and find it well within the abilities of the usually advanced kids who take it. I would have enjoyed such a course when I was a high school freshman, and again it is their choice.
I agree that teachers should have enough time to serve such students, but compare their available time to the graduate student TAs who do most of the teaching in such colleges in the state universities. The high school teachers in many cases have more time, and the charge that you can’t teach such intro courses well without an advanced degree is just plain wrong. Some of the best teachers I know, including Jaime Escalante, did fine without those extra degrees.
As for what the feds are spending to support test fees for low income kids, those who don’t like that should be happy because the new ESSA law cuts way back on such spending. I think this is very short-sighted, but it is a free country and I respect those that have other views;—Jay Mathews, Washington Post
“I think that is important because most of our high schools are underachieving, with the average high school student doing less than an hour of homework a night.”
So doing less than an hour of homework a night = “underachieving”? Could you please cite me some research that supports the benefits of doing more than an hour of homework a night (even, for that matter, the benefits of doing any homework)? Thanks.
Incidentally, even if your point is valid about students doing homework, that wouldn’t mean that the high school itself is “underachieving”. Students themselves may be underachieving, but that’s separate from the high school. You can have the best teachers teaching amazing curricula and still students might not apply themselves. Alternatively, you could have horrible teachers with horrible curricula and students might still achieve. You have to look at the school and the students therein separately.
I resent the idea that external accountability,like an AP exam, is needed for a rigorous course. I am perfectly capable of designing and delivering a rigorous course without an overseer.
Also, basing a finding on self report interviews is bad research. While it is a positive that Jay had interviewed students, there are issues of bias on both sides of those interviews.
Finally, maybe kids can handle this geography class in 9th grade and sociology in 10
th but the classroom conversations about issues occurring in room of 15 year olds would be markedly different from one with 19+ year olds from diverse backgrounds.
The sweeping claim that “These are [all] college level courses..what you get as a college freshman” is simply not necessarily true.
In fact, all you need is one case to prove the falsity of such an all-encompassing claim.
And how good a particular course is depends on many things: eg, the teacher, resources of the school, lab facilities for science courses.
I know for a fact that the AP physics course that one of my nieces took was most certainly not at the level one would get in a freshman physics course for scientists and engineers at a decent university, particularly not with regard to the lab component.
Despite her getting a 5 on the exam, I’d have to say, based on discussions with her that her knowledge of the subjects was underwhelming (at best) — and she actually admitted as much to me. She said she was surprised by her score. I was actually not surprised. The scores do not mean what some claim they do.
I am shocked that Jay Matthews would say something so wildly untrue and misleading:
“compare their available time to the graduate student TAs who do most of the teaching in such colleges in the state universities. The high school teachers in many cases have more time…”
High School teachers have more time than TAs? That’s a stunning statement without an ounce of evidence to back it up.
I also disagree with Matthews on AP for “underachieving” high schools. The most underachieving math classes are just as likely to be in an elite private school who claims their kids are too good to take AP exams. “Caclulus for overprivileged students” is supposed to be “better” than AP Calc so no need for an exam to prove it.
If Matthews really believed in APs, he would be attacking the elite private schools who insist their students are too good to have to take AP Exams because their non-AP courses are superior. I won’t hold my breath on Matthews criticizing that.
I think what a lot of pie-in-the-sky, idealistic critics of the AP curricula get caught up in is this idea of what is “college level.” When I first started teaching AP classes more than a decade ago, at a Title I school, I too carried this view. But I came to realize it’s wrong to think of college-level as some graduate-level seminar … or upper-level undergrad class … or even an entry-level course at Michigan or Ohio State … when in fact there are many, many community colleges around this country whose courses and clientele absolutely pale in comparison to the instruction that I deliver to my sophomores taking AP World History. Needless to say, when they move on to a 4-year university, they carry those credits with them. Would anyone care to suggest that they should have to repeat these classes at a “genuine” university? I concur with Jay’s reporting and find that his impressions closely comport with mine. It’s unfortunate that people with actual knowledge on the ground can’t seem to penetrate the thinking of those who’ve made up their mind, despite all contradictory evidence. I clearly remember all the discussion about “more and more” colleges not awarding AP credit, or only offering it for 5s, nearly 10 years ago! Meanwhile, the growth of AP continues apace …
One interesting thing to me (a physicist) is that the high school physics class that I had decades ago (based on the Physical Science Study Committee curriculum) was actually better (and I would say more challenging) than the AP course my niece had just a few years go because, with a large hands on lab component, the class I had really gave one a “feel” for the concepts rather than just focusing on memorizing formulas. It also sparked my interest in the subject — as opposed to making me never want to see another physics formula for as long as I lived.
In intro science courses, learning the concepts is far more important than being able to plug numbers into this or that formula.
Tracy
What you have said makes the general claim that “AP courses are college level courses” essentially meaningless because it means that one must specify a certain type of college and probably even a specific course at that college to compare the AP course to.
But thanks for clarifying.
I and other pie in the sky idealistic critics of AP were not the ones who came up with this “AP courses are college level courses” meme.
This has been a sales pitch for AP for as long as I can remember.
And it certainly never specified community college level. In fact, Another sales pitch is that you can get up to a year’s college credit if you score high enough on the AP test, including at some of the best colleges in the country. I know because I did . But that does not prove that the AP course was equivalent. In fact, I know it was not — at least not at the University I attended.
Tracy says I concur with Jay’s reporting and find that his impressions closely comport with mine.”
Now that’s what’s really unfortunate.
A Stanford U researcher reviewed 20 studies of AP and noted many of the issues.
http://news.stanford.edu/2013/04/22/advanced-placement-courses-032213/
The author answers the question “Is AP all that it is cracked up to be”
With “That, of course, depends”
The researcher also concludes (among other things) from the studies
That “We believe more research needs to be done before we can verify the broad claim that taking AP classes makes students more likely to succeed in college”,
That “if the AP program is to be used effectively to help make a difference in underserved schools, it will need to be part of a broader initiative”
That “it is a mistake to assume that all AP student’s high school experiences are enriched by the program”
And that “While some students might benefit from an AP program, several researchers note some hidden or opportunity costs involved in administering an AP program”
” ‘it is a mistake to assume that all AP student’s (sic) high school experiences are enriched by the program’ ”
Talk about your straw man.
Here’s who isn’t served well by taking an AP class in high school:
1) anyone who isn’t willing to put in the extra work required;
2) anyone who is so far below the needed preparedness level required by the course that, even after putting in the work, cannot shake a feeling of learned helplessness.
That’s about it. I return to the basic claim I took issue with initially with the post by Democracy: It is simply an absurd claim to suggest that students taking AP classes are no more likely to be challenged with rigorous curricula than students taking alternatives that don’t require a standardized check near the end of the year. Anecdotes don’t matter. Of course there are bad AP teachers. That in no way renders the original delusion more credible. As a practical matter, AP isn’t going away. We aren’t returning to how it was decades ago (many decades ago), when grade inflation didn’t exist … when honors really meant honors … when students had never engaged with digital technology (and reading comprehension scores hadn’t begun their decades-long plunge) … when the teacher pool hadn’t been diluted by new professional opportunities for college-educated women … and, ahem, when segregation was legal. Leave It To Beaver won’t be airing tonight.
“Anecdotes don’t matter.”
But yet that’s all you’ve given us to defend your position. SDP at least cited a meta study to support his/her position.
And what do you say about all the research that says AP just isn’t all that much?
Where is your school and what is its name?
Care to cite some actual, verifiable reaearch that supports your claims, other than “anecdotes don’t matter”?
Yeh, they certainly don’t, but that’s all you have cited.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
I suggest you take it up with the Stanford U researcher who reviewed the 20 studies of AP
Did you even read the report?
Obviously not because those were all quotes from the report — and all claims that have been made about AP courses.
PS the typo was mine because I simply typed the test from the report.
dienne77:
I don’t need a study to tell me the obvious, based on observations of 150 students a year over more than a decade. At some point, THAT becomes much more than merely anecdotal. And I don’t feel the need to do your work for you. You asked somewhere up there for a citation that doing ANY homework was of any value. Are you kidding me? Reading the textbook matters? Studying for tests matters? Would you ask the same of a football coach, for crying out loud? Did the champs in your state roll out of bed and just roll up the competition without having practiced much?
Tracy says “I don’t need a study to tell me the obvious”
The obvious?
Like this key conclusion of the above linked research paper?
“More research needs to be done before we can verify the broad claim that taking AP classes makes students more likely to succeed in college.”
Is that what you mean by obvious?
these are excellent questions and i would love to see the same critical thinking applied to the ib programs too.
as someone who was tracked from 1st grade and took 10 ap classes in high school, i have come to believe after obtaining a master’s in ed and teaching for 13 years that tracking is detrimental in the long run. unfortunately it needs to be all or nothing to ensure equity – if one school tracks, then everyone needs to track to compete.
i doubt that tracking will disappear though because my experience as a teacher showed me that many teachers feed their egos through teaching ap or advanced or ib classes or gifted programs. can we ever let go of the compulsion towards hierarchy and stratification?
It seems disingenuous to compare tracking with AP classes. There is a good argument to be made against tracking in elementary school.
But how can you possibly put students with varying math abilities in the same 4 math classes throughout high school? And why would that be better?
In Michigan when I was teaching students have a choice. They could take an AP course for a AP credit which might not exempt them from the basic courses they thought it would because each college and university had different policies on what this credit actually meant. Or the student could “dual enroll” in their high school and the local community college with the tuition, books, and fees paid for by the local public school district. At the community college they took courses which by law transferred as full credits for the same course at any state college or university. If they dual enrolled they attended the public school for one hour less each day. The AP courses lost their luster. True the AP courses were less expensive for the public school but the community college classes were much better for the public school students.
The dual-enrollment option is there for our students, as well. And why do you suppose so many choose to take the dual enrollment option for U.S. history rather than AP U.S. History? Do you think it’s because they’ll encounter a MORE rigorous curriculum with dual enrollment? That they’ll have to work HARDER than if they take APUSH? The conclusions are obvious, and yet people pretend they don’t understand …
Sigh…
I think it depends on the community college class and the high school.
A high school with lots of high achieving college bound students might very well have a more rigorous advanced math class (AP or not) than an introductory community college class.
Good that AP courses are being questioned. Never thought AP courses were any good. AP courses = more BS.
I have a question—recently, in the news, much was made of a young lady in high school who took COLLEGE LEVEL courses all throughout HIGH SCHOOL & graduated from COLLEGE, but still had to graduate from/finish HIGH SCHOOL. (I believe it was in Indiana, & courses were taken through Marquette U–?!)
Can anyone explain this to me? Diane?
It sure is interesting that the pro-AP commenters on this thread do not – and cannot – cite any solid evidence that Advanced Placement is any more than hype. To be sure – there are good AP teachers. Also to be sure – as a program – AP just is NOT what the proponents claim. Far from it.
Much of the AP hype that exist in the U.S. can be traced to Jay Mathews, who slobbers unabashedly over the “merits” of AP. Mathews not only misrepresents the research on AP but also publishes the yearly Challenge Index, which purportedly lists the “best” high schools in America based solely on how many AP tests they give.
Jay Mathews writes that one of the reasons his high school ““rankings have drawn such attention is that “only half of students who go to college get to take college-level courses in high school.” What he does NOT say is that another main reason his rankings draw scrutiny is that they are phony; they are without merit. Sadly, far too many parents, educators and School Board members have bought into the “challenge” index that Mathews sells.
The Challenge Index is – and always has been – a phony list that doesn’t do much except to laud AP courses and tests. The Index is based on Jay Mathews’ equally dubious assumption that AP is inherently “better” than other high school classes in which students are encouraged and taught to think critically.
As more students take AP –– many more are doing so…they’ve been told that it is “rigor” and it’s college-level –– more are failing the tests. In 2010, for example, 43 percent of AP test scores were a 1 or 2. The Kool-Aid drinkers argue that “even students who score poorly in A.P. were better off.” Mathews says this too. But it’s flat-out wrong.
The basis for their claim is a College Board-funded study in Texas. But a more robust study (Dougherty & Mellor, 2010) of AP course and test-takers found that “students – particularly low-income students and students of color – who failed an AP exam were no more likely to graduate from college than were students who did not take an AP exam.” Other studies that have tried to tease out the effects of AP while controlling for demographic variables find that “the impact of the AP program on various measures of college success was found to be negligible.”
More colleges and universities are either refusing to accept AP test scores for credit, or they are limiting credit awarded only for a score of 5 on an AP test. The reason is that they find most students awarded credit for AP courses are just generally not well-prepared.
Former Stanford School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek wrote in 2002 that AP courses were nothing more than “test preparation courses,” and they too often “contradict everything we know about engaging instruction.” The National Research Council, in a study of math and science AP courses and tests agreed, writing that “existing programs for advanced study [AP] are frequently inconsistent with the results of the research on cognition and learning.” And a four-year study at the University of California found that while AP is increasingly an “admissions criterion,” there is no evidence that the number of AP courses taken in high school has any relationship to performance in college.
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006) Clifford Adelman scolded those who had misrepresented his original ToolBox research by citing the importance of AP “in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. Adelman said, “To put it gently, this is a misreading.” Moreover, in statistically analyzing the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”
College Board executives often say that if high schools implement AP courses and encourage more students to take them, then (1) more students will be motivated to go to college and (2) high school graduation rates will increase. Researchers Kristin Klopfenstein and Kathleen Thomas “conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims.”
In fact, the unintended consequences of pushing more AP may lead to just the reverse. As 2010 book on AP points out “research…suggests that many of the efforts to push the program into more schools — a push that has been financed with many millions in state and federal funds — may be paying for poorly-prepared students to fail courses they shouldn’t be taking in the first place…not only is money being misspent, but the push may be skewing the decisions of low-income high schools that make adjustments to bring the program in — while being unable to afford improvements in other programs.”
Do some students “benefit” from taking AP courses and tests? Sure. But, students who benefit the most are “students who are well-prepared to do college work and come from the socioeconomic groups that do the best in college are going to do well in college.”
So, why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s become a rather depraved stupid circle.
One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school. Or else, the admissions board will be concerned that you didn’t take on a “rigorous course load.” AP is a scam to get money, but there’s no way around it. In my opinion, high schools should get rid of them…”
Jay Mathews calls AP tests “incorruptible.” But what do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP tests?
For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see “DBQ” ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.” And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.” Another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests:
“The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies’ and my AP classes couldn’t have given less of a crap. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”
An AP reader (grader), one of those “experts” cited by Mathews notes this: “I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”
Dartmouth no longer gives credit for AP test scores. It found that 90 percent of those who scored a 5 on the AP psychology test failed a Dartmouth Intro to Psych exam. A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Mathews called this an isolated study. But two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004).
When Dartmouth announced its new AP policy, Mathews ranted and whined that “The Dartmouth College faculty, without considering any research, has voted to deny college credit for AP.” Yet it is Jay who continually ignores and diminishes research that shows that Advanced Placement is not what it is hyped up to be.
In his rant, Mathews again linked to a 2009 column of his extolling the virtues of the book “Do What Works” by Tom Luce and Lee Thompson. In “Do What Works,” Luce and Thompson accepted at face value the inaccuracies spewed in “A Nation At Risk” (the Sandia Report undermined virtually everything in it). They wrote that “accountability” systems should be based on rewards and punishments, and that such systems provide a “promising framework, and federal legislation [NCLB] promotes this approach.” Luce and Thompson called NCLB’s 100 percent proficiency requirement “bold and valuable” and “laudable” and “significant” and “clearly in sight.” Most knowledgeable people called it stupid and impossible.
Luce and Thompson wrote that “data clearly points to an effective means” to increase AP participation: “provide monetary rewards for students, teachers, and principals.”
This flies in the face of almost all contemporary research on motivation and learning.
As I’ve noted before, College Board funded research is more than simply suspect . The College Board continues to perpetrate the fraud that the SAT actually measures something important other than family income. It doesn’t. Shoe size would work just as well.
[For an enlightening read on the SAT, see: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/%5D
The College Board produced a “study” purporting to show that PSAT score predicted AP test scores. A seemingly innocuous statement, however, undermined its validity. The authors noted that “the students included in this study are of somewhat higher ability than…test-takers” in the population to which they generalized. That “somewhat higher ability” actually meant students in the sample were a full standard deviation above those 9th and 10th graders who took the PSAT. Even then, the basic conclusion of the “study” was that students who scored well on the PSAT had about a 50-50 chance of getting a “3”, the equivalent of a C- , on an AP test.
A new (2013) study from Stanford notes that “increasingly, universities seem
to be moving away from awarding credit for AP courses.” The study pointed out that “the impact of the AP program on various measures of college success was found to be negligible.” And it adds this: “definitive claims about the AP program and its impact on students and schools are difficult to substantiate.” But you wouldn’t know that by reading Jay Mathews or listening to the College Board, which derives more than half of its income from AP.
What the College Board doesn’t like to admit is that it sells “hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions.” Clearly, College Board-produced AP courses and tests are not an “incorruptible standard.” Far from it.
The College Board routinely coughs up “research studies” to show that their test products are valid and reliable. The problem is that independent, peer-reviewed research doesn’t back them up. The SAT and PSAT are shams. Colleges often use PSAT scores as a basis for sending solicitation letters to prospective students. However, as a former admissions officer noted, “The overwhelming majority of students receiving these mailings will not be admitted in the end.” But the College Board rakes in cash from the tests, and colleges keep all that application money.
Some say – and sure does look that way – that the College Board, in essence, has turned the admissions process “into a profit-making opportunity.”
Mathews complains about colleges who no longer award AP credit. He says (wink) “Why drop credit for all AP subjects without any research?” Yet again and again he discounts all the research.
Let’s do a quick research review.
A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests was an intense two-year, 563-page detailed content analysis. The main study committee was comprised of 20 members who are not only experts in their fields but also top-notch researchers. Most also write on effective teaching and learning. Even more experts were involved on content panels for each discipline (biology, chemistry, physics, math), plus NRC staff. Mathews didn’t like the fact that the researchers concluded that AP courses and tests were a “mile wide and an inch deep” and they did not comport with well-established, research-based principles of learning. He dismissed that study as the cranky “opinion of a few college professors.”
The main finding of a 2004 Geiser and Santelices study was that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.” And yet – as commenters noted here – high schools add on the bonus. The state of Virginia requires it.
Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005) found that AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, they write that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.”
In other words, there’s no need for the AP imprimatur to have thoughtful, inquiry-oriented learning.
Phillip Sadler said in 2009 that his research found “students who took and passed an A.P. science exam did about one-third of a letter grade better than their classmates with similar backgrounds who did not take an A.P. course.” Sadler also wrote in the 2010 book “AP: A Critical Examination” that “Students see AP courses on their transcripts as the ticket ensuring entry into the college of their choice,” yet, “there is a shortage of evidence about the efficacy, cost, and value of these programs.” Sadly, AP was written into No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top and it is very much a mainstay of corporate-style education “reform,” touted by the likes of ExxonMobil and the US Chamber of Commerce.
For years, Mathews misrepresented Clifford Adelman’s 1999 ToolBox. As Klopfenstein and Thomas wrote in 2005, “it is inappropriate to extrapolate about he effectiveness of the AP Program based on Adelman’s work alone.” In the 2006 ToolBox Revisited Adelman issued his own rebuke:
“With the exception of Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005), a spate of recent reports and commentaries on the Advanced Placement program claim that the original ToolBox demonstrated the unique power of AP course work in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. To put it gently, this is a misreading.”
The book, ‘AP A Critical Examination’ (2010) lays out the research that makes clear AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.” It is the academic equivalent of DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). DARE cranks out “research” that shows its “effectiveness,” yet those studies fail to withstand independent scrutiny. DARE operates in more than 80 percent of U.S. school districts, and it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. However, the General Accounting Office found in 2003 that “the six long-term evaluations of the DARE elementary school curriculum that we reviewed found no significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received DARE in the fifth or sixth grade (the intervention group) and students who did not (the control group).”
AP may work well for some students, especially those who are already “college-bound to begin with” (Klopfenstein and Thomas, 2010). As Geiser (2007) notes, “systematic differences in student motivation, academic preparation, family background and high-school quality account for much of the observed difference in college outcomes between AP and non-AP students.” College Board-funded studies do not control well for these student characteristics (even the College Board concedes that “interest and motivation” are keys to “success in any course”). Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear.
I’m left wondering about this wonder school where “several hundred freshmen” take “both AP World and AP Psychology” and where by graduation, students routinely “knock out the first 30 ore more college credits.”
Where is this school, and what is its name? Jay Mathews will surely be interested.
30 or more….
I have the same problem with AP that I have with Dual Credit classes. It is not a question of whether the class is exciting or rigorous. It is not a question of whether the students are ready or not. It is a question of what society wants out of education. So I will pose it.
Why do we want to take our smartest kids and teach them half as much? True, it will be cheaper for kids to go to college. Why not just fund college? We need our smartest kids to get Western Civilization twice. They need to study American History under a good committed instructor in high school, then under an erudite, professorial relationship in college. We need all students to know the things we need to make them citizens. The smartest ones will hopefully be our community leaders and realize the importance of their education.
In my own experience, AP helped me out. While my friends were sitting through a college English class that mostly dealt with grammatical errors and writing basic essays, I was reading some good books in sophomore English. But my best experience was when I studied American History and Western Civilization again, it introduced me to the two professors who would be like fathers to me. We cannot predict where our experience will lead.
Good teachers are good teachers. Yet, there are plenty of “good” teachers who adhere strictly to the AP curriculum, because, you know….the test.
What public schooling sorely needs, now more than ever, is a commitment to citizenship education with an emphasis on democratic citizenship.
As Aristotle noted long ago, education should be public and not private. Especially in a democratic republic, “neglect of education does harm to the constitution…the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
Well said.