Tom Ultican spent many years in Silicon Valley. Then he switched careers and became a teacher of advanced mathematics and physics. He frequently taught AP courses. He recently retired.
He explains in this article why he turned into a critic of AP classes. He engaged in a dialogue with Jay Mathews, the veteran education journalist at the Washington Post. Mathews creates a method for ranking high schools based in the proportion of students who took and passed AP courses.
Mathew’s methodology has now become the US News and World report ranking of “the best high schools” in the nation. Ultican shows why this list favors charter schools, which may have small numbers of graduates and high rates of attrition. It is biased against large high schools that educate all kinds of students, not just survivors.
It’s a great read.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All these things used to RANK students are really STUPID.
and frighteningly racist
And completely unjust and unethical.
What a great post by Tom! All US News rankings are irrelevant and stink. Just as useless for medical institutions, yet they all use it in their marketing.
yes
The WaPo is the deformers mouthpiece. The ONLY person writing truth on education issues at WaPo is Valerie Strauss. Most of the puff pieces are likely coming directly from Fordham…..Finn, Petrilli, Pondiscio. The WaPo is the stink tank’s wet dream.
Any metric that can distill very complex systems into a single number highly suspect. They presume to measure something like “excellence” through a formula. Ultimately, these mathematical gyrations end up offering misleading information. Charter schools with high attrition rates get higher ranking than many excellent public schools when schools with 75% attrition rates and 20 graduates are ranked higher than public schools with 500 graduates and a 3% attrition rate. It is like comparing apples to oranges. These rankings are equally unfair to many fine schools with diverse students.
The first attempt to push American schools into overdrive was when Russia launched sputnik in 1957. We were told we couldn’t compete with the Russians. We have been racing ever since with “higher standards” and more and “better” tests, honors and AP classes. Our young people are on a competitive treadmill that is unnecessary, particularly for a future that includes lots of potential joblessness.
Ultican’s mother was right. Our universities are highly regarded throughout the world. Many foreign students come here to study. If American students are such failures, why do so many of our students graduate and get numerous patents and Nobel prizes?
I recently watch a profile of Dr. Jim Allison on PBS. He is a typical Texas “character.” Born in a tiny town that embraced “creationism,” he has gone on to make numerous medical breakthroughs in cancer research. He figured out how T-cells work and how to harness them to fight cancer. He is a remarkable public school graduate that won a Nobel Prize, and he leads the immunology department at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston.https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/conquest/immunotherapy-innovator-jim-allisons-nobel-purpose.h36-1592202.html
The great puzzle that “reformers” never address: How did the US become a wealthy and powerful nation if 90% of the people went to “mediocre” schools?
They would — and do — claim that the 10% (or even 1%) who did not go to medicate schools have driven the economy.
This mentality is rampant within industry, even the high tech industry in which the CEOs and company presidents take credit ( patents) and enjoy benefits (monetary reward) for most of what is created by their workers.
This precisely why inequality is so great in this country. It’s because a relatively small number of people (Gates, Jobs, Page, Schmidt, Cook, Zuckerberg, Ellison, etc) are taking the vast majority of the credit and benefits for the creativity and hard work of millions of other people.
And of course Bezos.
How did I forget him?
🙂
Tim Bday, VP from Amazon just quit over the treatment of the workers who had blown the whistle over Amazon’s failure to access safety concerns over covid 19.
Here’s what he said
“At the end of the day, the big problem isn’t the specifics of Covid-19 response. It’s that Amazon treats the humans in the warehouses as fungible units of pick-and-pack potential. Only that’s not just Amazon, it’s how 21st-century capitalism is done.”
Bray attributed the callousness to a
“lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power,”
Folks like Bezos actually seem to believe that the rest of us are disposable.
As a high school teacher–sometimes of “advanced” kids, I always though AP courses were a bad idea–especially if we’re actually building a “democracy” here in the US. There’s a lot more to life than college, than grades, than getting ahead of others. It’s time we revisited the wisdom of John Dewey and others who urged us toward a more democratic education. Kids should learn with kids their own age. It’s better for them and it’s better for their companions. They should stay and help the less gifted learn. Our society moves forward best when ALL are valued and all are helped to grow in knowledge.
Thank you, Jack.
There is also the issue of how both California public school systems are now using AP test results to game the grade point average for college applicants. Applicants to both the Cal State and UC systems are at an all-time high; in order to efficiently sift through those thousands of applications, UC/Cal State awards an AP grade with an extra point.
The result is even more hyper-competition to take as many AP classes as possible. Not only is this added pressure an unhealthy and unnecessary form of competition, it takes away any opportunity for students to take other enrichment classes such as music, art, graphic design, and construction. Awarding the extra point in the GPA is wrong in my view-applications can still be judged on their rigor, and the students would not be inclined to take an AP class just for the GPA boost, which they are doing now. They should take the class because they have interest/aptitude and they want to be challenged. AP testing should be optional, but that doesn’t fall in line with the testing $$$ machine.
In Oakland, there are stark reminders of the racial/income inequality of access to APs; much of this is caused by privatization/co-location, where high school populations such as at McClymonds and Castlemont, have been decimated over the years, resulting in lower “demand” for AP classes. Demand can’t happen if the district won’t hire a teacher for the class, and the lower perceived rigor becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, thus nudging the schools into the “low-quality” label and making them even more of a target.
It’s interesting that Mr. Mathews chose to use test scores rather than student participation to include in his Challenge Index metric. Access is one thing, but testing is another. And as we all know, anytime you tie testing to a ranking such as the Challenge Index, that ranking will be gamed in favor of cherry-picking and attrition, something that charters such as BASIS and IDEA do all too well (and which, not surprisingly, showed up at the top of the list). Unfortunately, in our hyper-competitive Race to Nowhere, we have emphasized testing of any sort as the be-all-end-all measure of school quality, and Mr. Mathews’ Challenge Index is just one more example of a flawed “quality” metric.
Years ago there were no AP classes. The most anyone could graduate from high school was a 4.0 average. Now with all the AP and honors classes, some students graduate with a 5.2. I doubt they are any brighter than the young people of the past, or is it just that we are heightening the competition?
Clearly, there is a need for classes that are even more advanced (and worth more grade points) than AP — to differrentiate students. Higher calculus classes are ideally suited for such differentiation.
The College Board should get on this immediately
This was a great article and the responses on Ultican’s site gave me hope that people on opposite sides of a political question–teaching and learning is most certainly a political question–can present their arguments without rancor and with measure. I have a few observations to add to the discussion that I have noticed:
–Many teachers feel comfortable with the idea of knowing what they need to teach and pressing toward that goal. I can respect that, and have noticed that those teachers sometimes are the ones who like the idea of AP.
–Administrators often are trained to look to AP classes as the major indicator of their success. This seems to me to introduce the Campbell’s Law effect. Perhaps that is why universities are giving college credit less and less for AP classes.
–Mr. Mathews seems to think that his contacts with students and teachers are a solid cross section of American society, but I rather think that the matter defies studying. It is a complicated thing. Nuance is a complicated game.
I am very glad that I took the AP test as a high school senior. I got 6 hours credit for it, and a ticket to take Sophomore English, a college course for which I was ready. I am very glad to have been exposed to a challenging English curriculum in high school. But I missed the opportunity to study under a local history teacher in another school in our county who did a marvelous oral history about a county race riot that ended with the courthouse burned and a lot of local self-examination. There are always trade-offs.
Ultican correctly points out some of the problems of AP classes. The biggest problem is that the goal of a class, to pass a test, robs the class of learning something because it is a necessity. Like the climber, who approaches the rock for its own sake, the student must sometime learn that the struggle must be undertaken for its own sake.
There are undoubtedly climbers who still approach the rock for its own sake, but they seem to be a dying breed, replaced by the fame and fortune seeking crowd.
Back in the old days (80’s) when I was climbing, we did it for the challenge and fun .
Now, it seems to be mostly about recognition and money. It’s not even recognizable to me.
I was not a fan of AP Physics because I needed to teach it in a single year of 1 hour classes during a school year that started after Labor Day. My students and I were much happier when I was teaching “Joe Physics”. I couldn’t believe it when AP scores were used to rank schools. I believed the scores were just another measurement of affluence.
The strongest motivation to do well on AP tests came from my promise to, if enough scores of 5 were achieved on APCalc, let the students shave my beard. Scores came in, the kids had at my beard, we ate a lot of hot dogs and then watched WWE. (I’m retired now)
I bet shaving David Coleman’s head would be an even bigger incentive.
Maybe we could get John Cena to hold him down while the students give him the shave.
Even better
David Coleman in the wrestling ring with John Cena.
I have a nephew who got a 5 on his AP Physics exam and he never took the class. He decided late on pursuing an engineering degree (for college) when he was in HS and it was too late to take the class and needed a physics credit to get into the college engineering program. He was a fair math student so his counselor gave him a packet of AP info test prep a week before the exam and told him to memorize the formulas and to “game the test” same as for the SAT (delete 2 choices automatically and the answer will be a simple math trick). The boy scored a 5! Unfortunately, this didn’t help him in college and he had to retake general physics and lost scholarship funds. The class and the testing are a joke.
Taking the exam without taking the class gives students the ability to demonstrate some degree of proficiency in topics that they have self studied. This is especially important when students have run out of classes to take before they graduate from high school.
Did you read the post?
And let me just add that he will now owe $50,000-$60,000 when he graduates because he had to go back and retake classes and lost scholarship funds. He also got a perfect score on his SAT math section which allowed him to skip the 1st college calc course since he had taken calc in HS….bad idea! College Calc for engineering students is NOT the same as HS calculus. All of this is just setting kids up to fail and not teaching them what they need to succeed.
Dr. Ravitch,
Certainly I read the post. I am sure that LisaM did not mean for the nephew to be taken as an example of what happens to all students who self prepare for an AP test, just an example of a poor outcome. Others have good outcomes. The same is true for AP classes.
The post is about why AP courses should not be offered.
LisaM
I agree.
The false equivalence between AP and college freshman courses can be particularly dangerous for students majoring in science and engineering because “placing out” based on AP test scores leaves the vast majority of students ill prepared in the more advanced classes and as you correctly point out, can even set them up for failure.
There might be a few “genius” exceptions to this rule, but they are few and far between (and don’t need courses and professors anyway, right?) and because freshman math and science classes are almost always more extensive than AP , it never hurts for students to take them even when they have had some of the material before.
If a student plans to pursue a major in the humanities and the college wants to give them credit for a science or math distribution requirement based on an AP test, I’d say take it, but I would certainly not recommend that any potential science, enineering or math major “place out” of freshman science or math courses because that is where you get the foundation upon which everything that follows is built and AP is no substitute.
Some people do it, for sure, but why erect a building on a wood foundation full of knots and gaps when you can erect it on solid concrete?
SDP,
Yet the few and far between are part of the “all” in the theme of this blog. Perhaps, however, some students are too expensive to educate.
You said above that “Taking the exam without taking the class gives students the ability to demonstrate some degree of proficiency in topics that they have self studied.”
But even a 5 does not demonstrate the level of proficiency one would be expected to achieve in a year long freshman level science or math course for science and engineering majors.
So with the test alone, how can one differentiate between the person who should not be “placed out” of the freshman course because they don’t really know the stuff and the “few and far between” who do know the stuff? One can’t.
Incidentally, I dont find the whole idea of “geniuses set back by ordinary courses” particularly convincing. One of the world’s top mathematical physicists, Ed Witten spent his undergraduate time studying history and linguistics and did not really focus on math until grad school. He not only got the Fields medal but turned out to be a socially well adjusted family man.
SDP,
It is unfortunate that LisaM’s nephew did not live up to expectations, but he is not the first nor will he be the last to do that. Others who scored 5 on exams do live up to expectations, some perhaps even exceeding expectations.
I take it to be a core principle of this blog that teachers should meet students where they are and help them to get to where they want to go. If where they are doing college level work and wish to continue doing college level work, schools should support the student. At the moment, the most common way they do that is by AP classes, but I am certainly open for other models.
It’s not about “living up to expectations”
No one one who knows anything about AP science and calc tests has particularly high expectations based on student scores on these tests.
In particular, the AP calc and science tests do NOT demonstrate the level of proficiency possessed by someone who has completed a year long freshman sequence in math or science for scientists and engineers.
And by the way, when I say AP science tests, I refer specifically to real sciences like physics, chemistry and biology.
A 5 on an AP Economics test may very well equate to graduate level proficiency in economics for all I know ( and I would actually not be surprised.)
SDM,
When you said “But even a 5 does not demonstrate the level of proficiency one would be expected…” I mistakenly thought that it was a matter of expectations. My apologies.
It would certainly be helpful if you could present some data about the performance of students who receive a 5 on AP exams. I look forward to any links you can provide.
I have worked with students who ended up getting 5’s on the AP physics and biology exams and I know for a fact that they did not have the same level of proficiency as someone who has taken a standard freshman sequence for scientists and engineers, not least of all because college science sequences include a lab that is usually more extensive than what people get in a high school AP class.
Being proficient in science is about much more than simply knowing which equation to use, plugging in numbers and turning a crank.
But that’s not something I would not expect an economist to understand
“Not something I would expect”
Advanced Placement Exam Scores as a Predictor of Performance in
Introductory College Biology, Chemistry and Physics Courses
Philip M. Sadler, Robert H. Tai (2007)
“Survey data from 8,594 students in 55 randomly chosen colleges and universi-ties finds that those having passed an AP science exam earn somewhat higher College science grades, but not enough to assume prior mastery. Moreover, half of this performance difference appears to be related to demographics and high school coursework and not to students’ AP coursework.”
… our study has found
indications that the AP
program, while certainly
of value to many students,
may lack some of the
evidence necessary
to support its claim of
academic rigor equal to
that of introductory college
and university courses in science”
Our findings suggest that the edu-
cators, teachers, parents, and students
would be better served by:
−An acknowledgment from the
College Board that evidence exists
indicating the non-equivalence of
AP courses and college courses in
biology, chemistry, and physics.
// End of quotes
I would note that what I was claiming above was simply the non equivalence of AP science courses to their freshman counterparts.
I was not claiming that having taken AP courses before taking the freshman sequence would have no effect on performance in the freshman sequence which the AP is supposed to be equivalent to (even though that impact appears to be minimal)
In fact, my point was that students should not be “placing out” of the freshman sequence simply because they got a 5 on the AP exam because that does NOT indicate equivalence.
But I don’t expect you will believe any of this because you have already decided based on one data point (your son) that allowing students to place out of “unnecessary” freshman sequences in math and science based on an AP test score is the best approach.
Thanks for calling this to my attention, Diane!! Coincidentally, i used almost exactly the same words about AP classes being “bad pedagogy” in my article “Will ‘Online Learning’ Work?” which I sent to our local superintendent and School Board: https://eduissues.com/2020/05/02/will-online-learning-work/. Now I have more ammo to use with this article!!
the tyranny of metrics
Interesting timing on this article, considering that AP testing starts today.
MODIFIED AP testing starts today. The test is pared down to 45 mins so that the kids can’t cheat by contacting their friends….they only have time enough to use their notes or books? That’s what your $99 gets you.
Even a 45 minute test still affords a chance to cheat.
They should make it a 5 second test.
That would pretty well eliminate the cheating.
Many students took AP tests today. There are multiple reports of students who submitted their answers and were told that their response was invalid and they had to retake the test. A glitch. Bad news for students who thought they were done.
Oh KNOW the testing is modified. I’ve spent all day getting kids as ready as possible for their AP exam tomorrow.
And the test is $94.00. I’m not saying AP is for everyone and I don’t like the pushing of AP everyone does, but AP is good for some.
I met some very dedicated, excellent teachers when I had an AP class years ago. Wonderful people. (Not to be confused with the alleged ‘college board’.)
Too bad those teachers’ work and skills were sucked into the black hole of standardized testing, along with the faith and goodwill of millions of students.
When I see the letters “A” and “P” together, I still get a bad reaction. Somewhere between hives and puking.
Thank God that supermarket “A&P” in town got bought out by…..I don’t know what it’s called now…it’s changed hands so many times since then. ACME groceries….?
I suppose you could write a novel skipping the letter “P” and still be understood. But “A”, well, that’s a big one. To wit: Wheel of Fortune. Or, in the case of teaching to that test, wheel of MISfortune.
Never, ever to be taught by me again, I can only hope. (I’m close to retirement but one never knows the rotten ideas that bubble up…)
I could say some additional, snarky things about that whole AP exam subculture.
And it IS one of those subcultures of American life.
My heart certainly was never in it.
I am a terrible bowler but I’d have much more luck joining a league down at my local bowling alley. At least that subculture is fun and I like the management there.
One can only hope that this pandemic might peel away some of the layers of phoniness in this world.
Cast out the AP exams..forever!
“One can only hope that this pandemic might peel away some of the layers of phoniness in this world.”
You mean there is a dearth of fidelity truth in the world these days?
I hold little hope that what you suggest will happen. There’s more money to be made by not being faithful to truth. . . just ask the preachers.
I’ve warned many parents about the AP racket; that these courses are in no way substitutes for college level work. The equivalency just isn’t there, and even if the student scored a 5, as one poster pointed out, it doesn’t mean they have a thorough understanding of the course material to advance. The best one can hope for is to gain some college credit and to lose nearly $100 per exam. Because colleges are all different now in terms of what scores they will accept for credit (and that varies from course to course) it’s nothing but a guessing game designed to delude parents into thinking that they can continue to advance in the Race to Nowhere in college by racking up lots of college credit before they get there. And it isn’t going to happen. But it makes boatloads of $$$ for the College Board.
It’s not the best way to test a student’s capabilities, unless you have the money and qualify for college credit lol. There should be some more affordable alternatives for low-income families, since a lot of bright kids don’t have the luxury of paying extra for AP Courses. College credit and scholarships should be offered equally for all, not just those who can afford it. I don’t think it’ll be abolished though, since it makes a lot of money for college boards and test preppers.