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<p>Too much emphasis on memorization of masses amount of information. This is particularly problematic in AP courses. I think AP curriculum is a huge scam perpetrated on public education. For me, this article does a good job of summing up the fraud.</p>
<p>[AP</a> Classes Are a Scam - John Tierney - The Atlantic](<a href=“AP Classes Are a Scam - The Atlantic”>AP Classes Are a Scam - The Atlantic)</p>
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<p>Yes. They are overloaded and expected to excel in every possible area. As a mother I can’t push my kids like that. It just goes against all of my instincts. And I know they are going to be successful no matter what college they go to. So I don’t waste time being angry over the college admissions process or worry what other kids and parents are doing. I just do not believe it will make a difference in the long run.</p>
<p>It may be an improvement, but I wouldn’t want someone treating me who’d been working more than twelve hours.</p>
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<p>There is no consensus on this.</p>
<p>[The</a> Phantom Menace of Sleep-Deprived Doctors
By DARSHAK SANGHAVI
New York Times
August 5, 2011](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom-menace-of-sleep-deprived-doctors.html]The”>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/magazine/the-phantom-menace-of-sleep-deprived-doctors.html)</p>
<p>In normal, day-to-day practice in hospitals across the country, medical errors didnt fall when work hours were reduced. A massive national study of 14 million veterans and Medicare patients, published in 2009, showed no major improvement in safety after the 2003 reforms.</p>
<p>I’m not crazy about AP either, but from a different angle. There is no standardization. CB puts out general goals, the individual schools come up with courseplans that CB will audit. You can look at those “guidelines” and might be surprised they don’t dictate homework, busywork.</p>
<p>Bel, consider that the 2010 reforms were based on awareness 2003 hadn’t gone far enough.</p>
<p>I have to agree with the above. I hated being sleep-deprived, oh I did! But the value of working straight through an on-call shift-- admitting a patient, taking care of them through the night, figuring out the diagnosis and treatment, seeing how they did, following up the next day, getting their plans in place, seeing the therapeutic outcome-- all part of so-called “continuity of care” which is lost with shift-related, piecemeal care. But. The residents are healthier, I’d think, regardless of whether or not medical mistakes are less, more, or the same. This is why the postgrad med world has introduced the new divisions in looking at resident shift work, patient transition/hand off, etc. It’s (again) a new world in medical training.</p>
<p>And there is data, at least in the pediatric literature, both about how much sleep may be optimal for teens (9-9.5 hr/night) as well as increasing work looking at what kinds of problems might be related to poor sleep hygiene. </p>
<p>And yes, most of the sleep issues in teens isn’t just the CC star doing a ton of homework. It’s also the issues of too much screen time, “running around” etc etc.</p>
<p>^ Facts trumping unsupported opinions. How non-CC!</p>
<p>Bwahahahah, anasdad!</p>
<p>Wait, what, someone requested unsupported opinions? </p>
<p>I have one: I think that due to sleep deprivation, far more high-school students fall asleep in class than did back when I was in school. I never actually saw a student fall asleep in a hs class when I was in hs. My dad was a high school teacher, and from his reports, it was exceptionally rare over his entire career for a student to fall asleep in class–only heard about one time in 40 years, during a movie, when the room was dark.</p>
<p>In contrast, QMP said that students fell asleep in classes at the local high school fairly often. It’s a fairly good school (Newsweek bronze/silver, depending on the year and the algorithm)–not in the category of Newton North or some other direction. I do think that many of the students get too little sleep. Back when QMP was in high school, for a lot of the time, we had only one family computer. So I got to use it for work after QMP went to sleep; and sometimes, this was at 1 am. For the first few minutes of my use, I often received IM’s from other students, who thought that QMP was still on the computer. Many of them were recognizable as “top” students. You could argue that they are wasting time IM’ing, and it’s true that a bit of time was lost to that, but I think that the main issue was the quantity of homework that was assigned, rather than gaming or long conversations by computer. (As far as I know, none of the students was on CC, which saves a lot of time right there.)</p>
<p>In one case, a student fell asleep in a required American government class, and the teacher deducted all of his participation points for the entire semester. This seems retaliatory to me, and ill-advised. And going back to the auto-qualification for MIT via the USAMO (hah! you thought I had dropped that!), there were students who took advantage of AIME qualification to get some extra sleep after glancing at the problems.</p>
<p>I have to believe that the teachers did not have a realistic idea of how long it would take for the students to complete their assignments. How long does it take a student to think up and type two single-spaced pages, covering about 10 different issues connected with a book that he/she has just read for AP Literature (not counting the time required to read the book thoughtfully)? How long does it take to prepare a 20-minute video to specifications on a historical topic? How long does it take to prepare a thoughtful, 30-page typed reader’s response journal on a book? The AP Calc BC teacher told the students when they signed up that there would be 2 hours of homework per night (times 6 classes = ?)</p>
<p>I do worry about the long-term impact of this, especially for those students who continue the pattern in college.</p>
<p>“especially for those students who continue the pattern in college”</p>
<p>No need to worry about specific students not getting enough sleep. People who are trying to sleep are not getting enough either since dorms are not as peaceful as homes.</p>
<p>Yes, good point.</p>
<p>My son’s AP Calculus teacher said it was a college course and while he would suggest homework he wasn’t requiring it. Students could do the number of problems necessary for them to feel confident they understood and would remember the material. AP classes don’t have to be excessively time consuming. </p>
<p>I’ve heard here about students being required to do dumb stuff like outline textbooks. I’m happy to say, my kids never had to do such nonsense.</p>
<p>Ok, I will bite - what is outline textbook!</p>
<p>^As far as I could understand from CC posters this means doing the opposite of making an outline for a paper. You make the outline you think the book was written from. So the main points for each chapter, each chapter section, each paragraph, all nicely numbered, lettered and indented.</p>
<p>Outline the pages in a textbook. Like I learned to do in lower school.</p>
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<p>AP calculus BC is supposed to be equivalent to a two semester long college calculus course, typically 4 credit hour units per semester. The usual expected workload per credit hour unit is 3 hours per week (including both in-class and out-of-class time).</p>
<p>Going by that, a high school senior in AP calculus BC (assuming a one year course starting from precalculus, not an “AP lite” version that assumes previous completion of AP calculus AB) should theoretically be spending about 12 hours per week on that course. If the same student is taking several other AP courses that are not “AP lites” or those equivalent to a semester college course but spread over a year, then that multiplies to a rather large workload (e.g. four non-“lite” AP courses = 48 hours per week; six non-“lite” AP courses = 72 hours per week).</p>
<p>This may be a slight overestimate, since actual college student workloads are somewhat less than 3 hours per credit hour unit per week, due to declines over the decades. Also, students in AP courses in high school are likely to be among the better students compared to typical college freshmen or college-bound high school seniors, so they may be able to work somewhat less to learn the material and do the assignments. But the workload is still pretty high for a high school senior taking six non-“lite” AP courses even accounting for that.</p>
<p>Perhaps that is why so many AP courses are “AP lite”, in that high schools take a year to cover what would be a semester-long course in college, or are not very difficult to begin with (e.g. human geography probably counts for both aspects). Making them truly college level in rigor by teaching the “AP lite” courses as semester-long courses instead of year-long courses would likely increase the workload of high school students taking more than two or three of them to unsustainable levels.</p>
<p>Okay, I’m angry, and we haven’t really started the process. My daughter’s school administers PSAT’s Sophomore and Junior year. I’m pretty certain that she’ll take the ACT so I’ve ignored this and not had her prep. Well, her Jr. year PSAT’s just came back. She’s up 100 pts in Writing and down 80 pts in Critical Reading and down 40 in Math. What kind of garbage testing is this? Isn’t is just suppose to be 9th grade material packaged in confusing ways? Why would scores jump so?</p>
<p>I have to say that I guess we were just lucky in that our school didn’t require ridiculous amounts of homework. My kids never were up until 1am doing homework unless they were first up until midnight playing videogames before starting that homework! My youngest son started taking AP’s as a freshman and as a junior last year had 6 AP’s (one of them self studied), band, plus was taking two Dual Enrollment classes each semester at the local college (ie. Statics and Multivariate Calc first semester). Yet, I’d say I rarely saw him doing more than 2 hours of homework a night, and that would usually be when he had a group project due and was covering for other members of the group, or “tutoring” his GF. 
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<p>All 3 boys were involved in at least two sports a year, in addition to marching band, pep/jazz band, and a large number of clubs. Occasionally some late nights would be necessary if they had for example a track meet a couple hours away and didn’t get home until late, and things needed to be done on the computer. But usually they could plan around this. I remember my youngest coming home from an indoor tennis tournament last year upset because he still had an essay to write for AP Gov and it was 9:30pm. He insisted he could NOT do homework (coherently) “that late”. As far as I know, he’s still maintaining a similar schedule at MIT - to bed between 10 and 11 and getting more homework (when he opts to do it!) during the day, despite the “norm” of students doing study groups and psets well after midnight.</p>
<p>^how is he going to find a girlfriend if he keeps going to bed so early? All the girls are doing psets after midnight and they need white knights.</p>