gossamerlt

everyone who takes an ap in my class is chinese. or mixed.
but tahts because i live in hong kong

kyrelle

my AP lit class is like, 90% girls. calc is a little more balanced, but it's still about 75% girls. government was about 70%, too. i never really thought about it until now, but geez.

our top ten is all girls, too, so maybe we just have smart girls this year, haha.

carsonne

my classes, too, are all severely unbalanced gender-wise.

there are 3-4 male in each while 7-13 female.

i think girls (at least most of the ones in my classes) just have a better work ethic.

i think its more than just having smart girls one year.

JoeTrumpet

My school is probably 50% black and Hispanic, the rest white (there are like 4 Asians). APs tend to be maybe 10-15%, 20% tops, black and Hispanic, though: if you compare regular level courses to AP courses you wouldn't at all think it was the same school, or even country. Interestingly enough, I've taken the most tests, and I'm Hispanic. Sometimes we do achieve

Gender-wise, #1 in our class is a guy, next two girls, then a guy, then mostly girls for a bit. Girls tend to work harder, and I definitely wouldn't say it has anything to do with them just being smarter than the guys. I'm sure they're of comparable intelligence, it's just the guys tend to not care nearly as much about school in the traditional sense. At the risk of sounding sexist, there are more girls in my AP courses that don't like the classes at all, they just know it will look good for college, whereas the guys are less likely to care about that so they don't bother with the course. That could be a negative for either sex, though . The guy that has passed the second highest number of APs in our school is lower in class rank because he doesn't do much, he just scores (relatively) highly on the AP exams. I'm not sure how well schooling is structured for male learning styles, but that's for another thread.

fiN01

My school is about 5% asian, 40% black and the rest white, but in all my AP classes it is about 30% asian and maybe 2% black. I'm the only hispanic in any of my AP classes.

Apotheosis

Wow, do we go to the same school?

lol, that's pretty much exactly like my school. Lots of hispanics and blacks, and a lot of the AP classes are comprised of minorities, except for physics and calc.

meili

i have only seen 2 black ppl in all of my ap's..1 in apush & psych

the only hispanics i've seen are in spanish lang & 1 in calc bc

the majority at my school who take aps are asians & whites

adamonkey2

my school: 99% asian
AP: 100% asian
IB: 100% asian

go asians!

Placidia

My school:
>50% Black and Hispanic
1-2% Asian (I'm one of them)
The rest are Caucasian.

In my Spanish Lang AP there were 8 people, 5 of whom were Hispanic.
In my Latin Lit, 7/8 were Caucasian.

Our Honors English class had a discussion about uneven racial distribution in higher-level classes. My teacher says that it's because Caucasians who should be in lower levels won't take those classes because they don't want to be with the Black and Hispanic students, and Black/Hispanic students who should be in higher levels won't take those classes because they don't want to be with the Caucasian students. Needless to say, most of our class disagreed with him and we gave him the silent treatment until he stopped making generalizations and changed the subject.

conker

This policy really doesn't make any sense to me. Only 30% have to pass? They're practically begging schools to cheat the system! Shuffle underqualified black and Hispanic students into AP courses to meet the 30% quota -- even if they all fail, at least enough of the other students who are actually supposed to be in these classes will pass to bring the overall pass rate over 30%. (That's assuming the school is competent. On most AP exams, getting a 40% will earn you a 3. So why are schools being rewarded for sending 70% of their students into a test knowing less than 40% of the material?)

The reason there are so few black and Hispanic students in AP classes is not that theeir schools aren't encouraging them to take AP classes. It is a much deeper social problem that extends beyond the reach of education policymakers. Black and Hispanic students tend to be lower on the socioeconomic ladder, and they cannot afford to focus on academics -- not to mention that they often grow up in bad neighborhoods where they are subject to bad influences. Thus, they are already at a disadvantage in primary school, and the gap only widens as they get older -- some need to get jobs to supplement the family income. When you're working 8 hours a day after 6 hours of school, is it any surprise that you're not concerned about "challenging yourself academically" and taking AP classes? And yet, the lawmakers' proposed solution is to force these people to take AP classes. Brilliant.

Rhapsody in Green

I think this is a wonderful policy. In my many AP classes in high school, I only ever saw... 3 black students, probably no hispanics, if I remember correctly. So this is about 3 urms out of enough AP classes to prepare me for 12 AP exams in my ~25% black high school. Everyone on this forum complaining about affirmative action should be happy about this policy, because this is a truly sensible way to at least make a stab at dealing with racial inequality in our society.

I understand why some people have reservations about the plan, but I think it's important to remember that this isn't binding, it's simply a award to create an incentive for schools to try to do this. I'm not even sure if there's any money attached, but it's pretty clearly not something that will force a school to fulfill this goal if they have good reasons not to. This won't be "forcing people to take AP tests," as Conker suggests, merely encouraging some people who might not ordinarily give it much thought to try them.

Yeah, I'm basically responding to conker, because I think (he? she?) has some reasonable, but flawed criticism, so let's address some other stuff in (his? her?) post. There certainly are deeper social problems that education policy can't directly address, but this at least does cut reasonably deep into the issue. Yes, many minority students do have bad influences growing up, and yes, some people do work 8 hours a day to supplement family income, but the latter are a minority, and bad experiences growing up should not disqualify someone from future success. It's tough to overcome a bad early grounding in academics, but it can be done, and it has to start somewhere. And with the way high school curricula are set up today, there are artificial barriers imposed by school administrations beyond just a lack of a strong understanding of basics. I don't mean to imply that schools have racist policies to prevent minorities from succeeding, but rigid tracks of classes do, in my opinion, have a de facto effect of limiting minority and poor white student access to higher educational opportunities. Students in higher performing tracks will have more academic opportunites. That's a necessity in any school system with varying levels of competency among students. The problem is that there's often very limited mobility between these tracks. Once a student is placed in the lower track, the administration often does not make it easy to get out. So who gets placed in the higher tracks? 1: people who were star students early in their lives and place into it, and 2: people who are willing and able to fight a little bit to get into them. 1 will by and large not be people with troubled backgrounds who might, by the time high school has rolled around, have matured, and developed a greater interest in academics. 2 will consist primarily of people who understand why these classes are important (generally, have educated parents), think they can succeed in these classes (generally, have educated parents or smart peers; I think people who could succeed in these classes are often scared away because they're so foreign and people make them out to be incredibly difficult), and, in some cases, have parents who are willing and able to fight against to school administrations to get their kids past arbitrary rules into the classes where they need to be. The realities of the socioeconomic situation of URMs in the U.S. are certainly the primary reason why so few URMs are in advanced classes, but some blame certainly does fall on the way public education is run as well. This policy will help encourage schools somewhat to allow and encourage mobility into these upper tracks, even if interested students may not seem very likely to receive top scores (hence only 30% pass rate required), which will help remove this artificial barrier to minority success in AP classes. It's a small step, but worthwhile.

And besides, even if it doesn't make a huge difference, what harm can it cause? I don't really see much in the way of drawbacks to what is essentially a pat on the back for some succesful schools.

JoeTrumpet

Interesting points, Rhapsody. Coming from a school with a high black/Hispanic population, I think you definitely have valid points about students feeling too scared of taking AP courses because of how foreign they seem. They simply don't have counselors or teachers that even consider motivating students to take a shot at these courses, and my school has a policy that actually makes it more threatening to take a stab at AP courses: if a student signs up for an AP course, they must sign a contract saying they will under no circumstances request to remove the course from that course from their schedule unless they have exhausted every possible resource, have Fs for the first semester, and have the teacher recommend it. The fact that a student has to hold out a full semester like that really will not be appealing for students who are scared to death of the course to begin with (regardless of whether or not they in reality have anything to fear).

Further harming the case, unfortunately, is peer pressure. I've definitely seen some students breaking out from what their friends who look quite lonely in AP courses. Some would be ostracized if their ability and interest in these courses were known (nobody wants to be a "sell-out"). I escaped it because, quite frankly, I never had any other Hispanic friends to begin with as I was too nerdy I can imagine if all my close friends were far from considering AP courses my life might have been different (at age 14 it's very easy to see why students make this bad choice, and after that they're already in the "bad track").

What an awfully tough problem to try to fix.

Zinokey

How stupid. I thought everyone was equal? Hispanics I can understand, especially if they can't speak good English, but black people? C'mon, asians can do it, so why not you? Let the black community rise to the occasion themselves.

TheJuggler

interesting. at my school, more guys are taking AP classes than girls.

JoeTrumpet

@ Zinokey: I don't understand your point. Are you suggesting that schools just ignore Hispanics and blacks because they aren't achieving on their own? Isn't it a school's job to do what it can to encourage students to do their best? I don't see the point in having them ignore the situation. It's a shame that these students haven't done their best, but that doesn't mean we just forget about them: it's better for everyone if we have more students putting more effort into their education. It's the reason we have public schools.