<p>I can’t seem to edit my post as the wheels are about to fall off again, sp I’ll just say that we were surprised to find that D’s school credited her with 8 hours of English and although it was more expected 8 of Math, and 8 of Bio.</p>
<p>Bigredmed- At my school (suburan Houston) it was 6.0 for an A in honors/AP classes, 5.0 for an A in ‘advanced’ classes, and 4.0 for an A in ‘academic’ classes. It does encourage students to take AP and honors classes just for the grade boost, but at least it also rewards those students in class rank, which is particularly important in TX because the top 10% are automatically accepted to state schools.</p>
<p>At my son’s school regular and honors classes are 4.0 for an A. It is 5.0 for a A in AP classes. This is in mid-Michigan and I have never heard otherwise.</p>
<p>Cur, It is not the fault of CB that AP courses are now being used for competitive college admission rather than their original intent. </p>
<p>AP courses are only as good as the teachers teaching it and the students who are taking it. In a system where most high school teachers are barely qualified to teach high school level subjects, it is not surprising that these courses are ineffective for their original intent. </p>
<p>My D took five AP through her junior year (Chem, Bio, Calculus BC, USHis, EuroHis) and received 5 on all her tests. Being a professor in bio/chem, I know her bio knowledge is dismal. Her calculus was well taught because of her teacher. The other three were quite inadequate. She took another 6 AP’s in her senior year, but did not take the test since her college choice does not grant AP credits for which I agree whole heartedly.</p>
<p>At my school it’s required that students take the AP exams. I’ve never heard of anyone getting less than a 3, last year in the APUSH class every person except one got a 5 (the other got a 4). At my school it’s also extremely difficult to get into an AP class, most if not all are 9 or less students, most are in the 6-8 range.
It’s also unheard of for anyone to take more than 3 APs a year because it just wouldn’t be possible.</p>
<p>This of course hurts us significantly in the college process because there are HSs like our local public who basically lets anyone into an AP class, the class isn’t at all difficult, and then very few of them bother to take the exam because they know they wouldn’t do well.</p>
<p>Weighting for GPA calculating at d’s school:<br>
College prep - 1.00
Honors - 1.03
High Honors = 1.06
AP - 1.07</p>
<p>Honor roll is based on unweighted GPA. No ranking. (But I have seen many girls listed as Bloustein Scholarship winners, which is the NJ state award with a top 10% criterion, so the school obviously releases ranking info when it is required. That’s done with weighted GPA.)</p>
<p>They limit the number of AP courses each girl may take to three per year. Only jrs & seniors may take them. No girl may take two AP science courses in the same year. To be admitted into any honor, HH, or AP, the girl needs to hit a certain grade in the pre-requisite course. Sometimes a PSAT or entrance exam benchmark must be hit, too. Summer assignments are required & every girl must sit for the AP exam. AP scores are excellent.</p>
<p>At our local public h.s., anyone with a pulse can take AP. (Well, not really, but anyone with a shrill parent or a politically connected family can.)Curriculum is not covered in full & top students wind up teaching themselves the material. Very few sit for the exam, and passing rates are dreadful.</p>
<p>I’m late to this discussion but wanted to respond to sloparent. William Lichten of Yale published a paper on the very same issue “Whither Advanced Placement?” on the dilution of rigor in AP-Enlgish.
<a href=“http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n29.html[/url]”>http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n29.html</a></p>
<p>The more general problem has been known for a long time. It’s surprising that CB is only tackling it. Many many schools do not require their students to take the exam (ours does not) and many many students do not. The course contents do not match the expected rigor of the curriculum in many of those schools.
So why offer the courses? They are often the only courses available to students who do want subjects taught at a higher level. Why ask students to take the exam? to validate the course content. There was a time when honors classes were abolished in our school. Students were either in heterogeneous classes that had students reading at middle school level at best together with students who had college-level reading skills; or they were in AP classes. The result was that some students who would have been happier in Honors classes were forced to take AP classes if they wanted more challenging courses than the heterogeneous classes. It was a horror. The school has now reinstituted Honors classes, but also encourages as many students as possible to take AP classes. This is partly why it does not require all students to take the exam. As long as the rigor of the classes can be maintained, this is a policy that I support.</p>
<p>That said, all the criticisms about teaching to the test, the AP classes not being in the least like college courses, not teaching reading critically, writing well, doing research, etc…, all these are valid. This is why some of the more prestigious schools, both public and private do not offer or have stopped offering AP classes. Yet, their students take the AP exams and do well on those.</p>
<p>It’s wonderful that a school has wonderful teachers that can teach great subjects, however, if a certain amount of content is not covered, the students are not going to be prepared for a rigorous college where it is often assumed that the students know certain things. The AP courses are supposed to cover those things, and they may not be presented in a way that some teachers can teach in an interesting way. However, as Marite says, there are many highschools that teach the subject without calling them AP and yet those students who take the ?P exam do well on them. And there is often a two fold reason for not labeling the courses as AP level. That way the teacher is not bound to cover everything in the AP curriculum, and the students are not bound to take the exam. Only those who want to take the exam do. In my boys’ school, there are after school classes offered to prep for the AP exam that complement these courses. Also the highschool curriculum as a whole does an excellent job touching on the subjects considered essential for a incoming college student to know, so the course that is approximately AP level, but doesn’t proport to be an AP course is often just frosting on a very substantial cake. Throw in a prep/review course/sessions and the kids are set having had a very satisfactory class and learning all the material needed as defined by CB. Unfortunataely schools who have not achieved that level of excellence too often hide behind the excuse of the material not being interesting, involving too little critical thinking, etc, etc, when they really don’t want to be stuck to that level of teaching and responsible for covering that set amount of material. I find it very hard to believe that a good teacher could not present the material well. It may be that the department has to be in synch to cover the material properly,not cram it all in one course. But whatever, the reason is, there are schools that teach terrific courses that the student enjoy, AND cover the AP material thoroughly. I find this argument that it cannot be covered well embarrassing, considering the calibre of kid who take this course. By not having the kids take the exam, the school, department, teacher, student is not willing to take accountabilty for content learned. Plenty of time to take the more esoteric courses when you go to college. IF you want to go to a selective college, skip the traditional frosh courses, then you need to show that you know the basic material which by necessity is a standardized test. </p>
<p>I am not saying the AP content/tests are perfect. But they provide a consistent standard that colleges can interpret since they are available nationwide. They also lay out specifically what needs to be covered in a given course so that teachers/students anywhere can learn that material. I don’t see where the problem for this lies.</p>
<p>I once took a course called “Philosophy.” It wasn’t labelled AP or Honors but at the beginning of the semester the teacher made clear to us that if we made it through the course, we’d be “ready to take college-level courses.” It was at least as rigorous and far more eye-opening than most courses I’ve taken (APs included).</p>
<p>I know there’s no AP Philosophy, but my point is that I wish that there were more courses like this in high school. In fact, if there were an abudance of truly excellent high school teachers, I doubt that there would be a real need for programs like AP. The best teachers don’t need rigid standards, special course designations or AP tests to make their courses enjoyable and rigorous (although I do recognize the need for a degree of standardization).</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the Philosophy teacher was forced to leave my school due to No Child Left Behind.</p>
<p>Like many other things I’m learning, I thought the main benefit of AP courses was the opportunity to get college credit. Unfortunately, this was not the case in a lot of the schools we looked at, though you could sometimes use teh AP credit to place out of certain classes. S. worked very hard for those 5’s including one he and a few others decided to take on their own. Most competitve schools expect students to take them, but then there’s relatively little “payback” other than testing yourself in a more rigorous course.<br>
He found the exams to be cut and dry, as long as you carefully studied the textbook provided. Whether or not the classes were rewarding to him depended on the teacher.</p>
<p>Perplex, though it is wonderful you got the philosophy course that you did, it is more important to ensure that kids get a consistent base of knowledge for college–at least those who want to be prepared for a rigorous college should have that opportunity. Too often there are “philosophy”, “religion”, “culture”, and other wonderful subjects that do not cover enough fundamentals. A superb teacher covers those fundamentals AND makes the course interesting, stimulating discussion, and requiring analysis and debate. There are opportunities to take ancillary courses during the summers at any number of community colleges or precollege programs. I have even seen course of this sort given at community rec centers, and some of them are wonderful and informative. Time enough to load up on these courses in college. Better you get the true base needed so you are prepared to take the courses at the level offered at a rigorous college.</p>
<p>I think that many AP courses are at the level of an average college. Average colleges just aren’t that strong. So for many AP courses won’t be at the same level as the colleges they’ll be attending. I don’t think this is the end of the world. I personally think that kids should be required to take the AP exams, both to keep teachers honest and so that only serious kids end up in the courses. Though I do understand the counter-arguments. I know that at least one of the APs my son will take this spring (Latin) is no good for credit at at least one of the colleges he is applying to.</p>
<p>
I personally hope that the possibility of placing into more advanced college courses would be the main point of the AP program, rather than the piling up of college credits and graduating early from college. Additionally, as I and others have pointed, AP classes are often taught at a much higher level than other high school classes. Despite the flaws of the AP classes, they suit students who want the challenge they cannot find in other high school classes, including Honors classes.</p>
<p>
That is not unique to AP classes. It can be found in any high school as well as in many if not most colleges.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, are you asking me about the credits or the number of APs?
He took 2 APs as sophomore, 5 as junior and 5 as senior and still he had a free study hall time. About the credits, they gave him more for AP Chemistry (10 credits, score 5) than the other ones; they gave him none for AP Comp. S (score 5), and he had credit for Statistics, Calculus AB, Calculus BC and others, in all he scored 5. (WUSTL, Engineering School)</p>
<p>Is a 6 point weighing standard for AP classes? I’m curious about this because we’re only offering a 0.5 weighing on a 4 point scale :(</p>
<p>At my school it’s .33 for honors and .66 for APs</p>
<p>cptofthehouse, when I wrote “more courses like this” I wasn’t referring to courses like Philosophy and Religion etc.; I agree with you that these are not by any means central to what should be learned in high school. What I really meant to say was what you said:</p>
<p>“A superb teacher covers those fundamentals AND makes the course interesting, stimulating discussion, and requiring analysis and debate.”</p>
<p>(btw, I do everything in my power to prepare myself for a rigorous college; I hope to major in physics at a university like UC Berkeley, Caltech or MIT, and I focus most of my efforts on being sufficiently prepared - especially in mathematics - to succeed.)</p>
<p>Marite, another reason to take AP courses is to attempt to get the core of knowledge they provide, sometimes very important if you go to a school that is not used to sending kids on to selective colleges. In some cases, the student will have to assume the responsibility of learning everything on the syllabus thoroughly, if the school’s track record is poor on the AP tests. Also there are student who want to get out a year early for a number of reasons that make sense. Our former neighbor’s son finished college in 2 and a half years, which made it more affordable for the family. He received stipends to continue graduate studies at the same school, so he ended up staying there a while any ways. But it really helped his parents as he had two younger brothers who were going off to college. There was only a 6 month overlap for him and a brother. With the cost of private colleges these day, it can make a big difference.<br>
I agree that AP courses can be cut and dry along with the exams. But there are schools whose departments revolve around the exam, and by starting highschool with the intent of covering the material, there is no reason that skilled teachers cannot make the courses as interesting and insightful as any course. Many private schools I know do this all of the time, and it’s not as though you are catering to the challenged students in this endeavor. We just don’t have enough consistent standards for courses in this country. What I do like about AP and IB courses is that there is a standard, a syllabus and an exam. You can measure the knowledge learned. When I hear of kids saying they learned more in a given class than an AP class without an exam to measure, I find it hard to believe. Not that such classes don’t exist; it’s just hard to make the judgement without a standard and test of sorts.</p>
<p>At ours, no weighting for any course.</p>
<p>Too many kids I have known who took a “Calculus” course cannot get through a college calc course the following year. They have taken a “Calc Lite” course and woe to them if the preceding course did not build a strong base, in additon to shorting them on what is needed for college calc. This is not a new phenomonon. It happened to my husband many years ago as well. He had to go back and take a Precalc course freshman year, after and then retake calc on the college level (which he had started to do first term and realized he was waaay over his head and his highschool calc course was woefully inadequate.) THough I do know kids who retake calc in college, even after doing well on the Calc AB exam, such kid will know their calc well enough to get through the retake successfully. This is so important for those kids who need to build on the math sequence such as engineering majors.</p>