"Clamor for AP classes alters program's intent"

Parents Forum
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<p>breadand butter</p>

<p>your point was mentioned frequently. It has certainly been a great plus for my son to have some classes with only (or mostly) motivated students, as is true in his AP classes.</p>

<p>Re: methods of inquiry or philosophy</p>

<p>It’s a point I wanted to make, but someone beat me to it; learning to think, to analyze, to ask questions can be the most important learning of all. There’s a place for memorizing dates and equations, but unless there’s a sense of what it’s all about and a framework to put it in, it may not add up to much. A really good LA or U education helps a student build this kind of foundation.</p>

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<p>The school my kids attend does not weight, so kids taking AP are taking a risk with their GPAs. That does keep the less-serious out of AP classes so I think they do a good job of teaching the material. It is interesting though, only one AP teacher required the kids to do any independent research. I think she is making a genuine effort to prepare her students for college level work. Most of the AP classes were heavily drill and kill, focusing on rapid covering of a large body of work and recalling it on structured tests. Not a lot of critical thinking, but I DO think there is value in memorizing foundational material as PREPARATION for college level work.</p>

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<p>Mombot:</p>

<p>The UCs do their own weighting calculations - they don’t pay attention to the school’s figure. Don’t many/most other Universities do this? If so, it seems that those avoiding them to seemingly boost their GPA are liable to end up hurting their college-calculated GPA instead.</p>

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<p>My son did two research papers using original sources for APUSH. He had to research an area an present it to the class in AP Bio. (Of course this was after the AP… NY has classes for another month, which means they have to cover the material in less time than kids from other parts of the country.)</p>

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<p>What you get out of an AP class will depend on your school and your teacher. Better schools/teachers will encourage research and papers. Good schools/teachers will just prepare you for the exam so you can get a good score. Bad schools/teachers poorly prepare you for the exam and may assign lots of busy work instead of covering the material properly. </p>

<p>I am at one of those good schools and have had good teachers for my AP classes. I know I am being prepared for the exam and that I will get atleast a 4 if I put forth the effort (this has been true so far) but I feel like we aren’t learning enough of the material. It is almost as if AP is constricting what we can learn. My AP Physics teacher wants to teach us more and go more in depth, but it’s not on the AP exam, so we move on. I am in my 3rd AP history class and I have done 1 research paper. Last year in AP Chem the teacher decided to go through the material slightly slower so we can retain everything and have a better understanding of the material instead of having us do more labs. It’s more about the test in my experiences.</p>

<p>At some local private schools, they no longer offer AP, but have other higher level classes where they go beyond the normal high school load. I guess these classes can go more indepth and the students can spend time on papers or labs because they are not rushed to prepare for a standardized test.</p>

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<p>I don’t necessarily feel like my classes are “rushed” per se, but we definitely do have to keep track of the amount of time until the test. One perk of taking AP classes is the fact that school (where I am) continues until the end of May, so after AP testing, we don’t have to attend class. That means 2 hour lunch breaks, sleeping in, or leaving school early (or some combination thereof). For WHAP, we worked on a small group project during this time since, as sophomores, very few students could drive off campus to do something else, and it was in the middle of the day.</p>

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<p>My S took APUSH in his junior year, as is the custom in our school. But he was graduating in early June. APUSH did have a final project, but since school ends in late June, the teacher did not assign the topic until well after the AP exam. This meant my S had to scramble mightily to research and write his paper by the end of May. Other students had another month to do the paper. I don’t believe his AP-English language class had a final project.</p>

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<p>APUSH in d’s Catholic h.s. is essentially a two year course. High honors as a soph, followed by AP as a jr. Covering the text takes two years, but the bulk of the girls’ workload is original source document evaluation. Tons of writing is required. Document based question tests are challenging, where the girls are required to answer questions based on five or six documents they have never seen before. Structuring the course in this way allows for an incredibly in-depth presentation & a very worthwhile experience. Her Latin is handled in a similar way. She’s in Latin 3, which is a high honors course and it is taught with the AP Latin students. All translate the same works, so it’s just a matter of moving from Ovid in one year to Virgil (or whatever) the next. Over two years, the girls’ ability to delve further into classics is greatly enhanced.</p>

<p>The school limits the APs to jr & srs, but the foundation is firmed up with high honors courses in frosh & soph. No student can take more than 3 each year, and no more than 1 AP science at a time. (There are additional lab requirements for HH & AP science courses, so it would be impossible to meet other core requirements & fit in two sciences.) Some parents have balked at the restrictions, but the school insists they know best. I know that some girls who love sciences focus more on SAT II tests taken after a HH course. Organic chem is a challenging course, and I really don’t think any college would be frowning on a girl who took OC, which is a HH course, at this h.s. yet only had two science APs on her transcript.</p>

<p>Isn’t it more sensible to have a few REAL APs, actually taught at a true college level, than cram in a dozen that are really just mile-wide, inch deep survey courses?</p>

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<p>I should add that my own town public abruptly jumped from offering six APs to over 20 in less than ten years. (I was one of the vocal parents at BOE meetings asking for the curriculum to be enhanced. I didn’t expect Bozo the Clown to be running the show, however.) Many of these courses are poorly designed, poorly taught, and taken by unqualified kids. Results are poor, as could be expected.</p>

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<p>ucla<em>uscd</em>dad: Although colleges will do their own weighting, the problem with NOT weighting AP courses lies in the class rank. If schools rank, students who take AP’s may end up with a lower rank due to tougher classes. It’s even a problem at schools that do not rank, because colleges often insist on knowing if student was in top “x” number or percent. My D is in a private that weights honors & AP classes. This results in the students who perform best in the most difficult schedule of classes being ranked at the top of the class. My friends in the local public school district pushed for ranking last year. It resulted in a short-term influx of kids who wanted to boost their GPA’s, but they quickly found out that they were being graded on the quality of their college-level work. Lots of midterm drops.</p>

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<p>But lots of first year college courses are mile wide inch deep survey courses.</p>

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<p>'tis true, particularly at the big publics. Even at Cal and UCLA many intro social science classes are mostly book cramming, since a prof (or his TA’s) ain’t gonna grade 800+ research papers. Ditto Calc and frosh inorganic chem; however, lab work at the Uni level beats most high school AP labs easily (insurances won’t allow 16 year olds messing around with benzene-laced EtOH, nor 18 molar acids).</p>

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<p>But would any college student take a dozen survey-style courses? That seems odd to me. Even courses that I had almost 30 years ago (at Rutgers) that were designated survey courses reqired research papers. I guess times have changed. In order to complete graduation requirements, your curriculum choices had to move away from intro courses, at the very least by junior year. </p>

<p>None of the intro-level lab courses I took in college ever used more than the garden variety chemicals h.s. kids experiment with.</p>

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<p>I can still remember how I felt arguing with a professor about a paper I had written in UG school. Her response was that Undergrads were not supposed to think creatively in her American History course as we did not yet have the requisite underpinnings of data to do so. Grrrrrr.</p>

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<p>Of course, the answer is no, but so is the answer for AP courses. For example, the average student accepted to Stanford only has 5 APs, which IMO seems like a rather decent number - a couple of science and/or humanities classes, calc/stat and Eng Lit – great preparation for the rigors of college.</p>

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<p>And not every AP class is run like a survey. Computer Science, Latin - Virgil and Calculus aren’t.</p>

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<p>If you go to a high school that has a good track record with the selective college and a profile that is very strong (these tend to be schools well known to adcoms), you can get away with survey courses. I know some kids who did take quite a few of them. In fact at my sons’ school senior year tends to have a light schedule with few requirements, whereas there is little leeway freshm and soph years, and most kids going super heavy duty AP junior year. But even the kids taking those survey courses often take AP exams, as there are no restriction on taking the exam, just advice. And these kids tend to do well. If you are not in such a school, it is NOT advisable to try to do this, but instead to take a few tough APs and focus on doing well on the test, preferably junior year if your school does not have a good track record for test results. Unfortunately most schools do not let kids take much as a junior. You take what you can, and hope the scores on what you took are very good and the colleges get that indication and extrapolate for your senior year AP courses. </p>

<p>What’s unfortunate is that at some schools, the AP curriculum is not good, the kids do not take the test, and those who do, perform poorly, the teachers do not get the material properly covered, and, yet, top students who are looking at selective schools HAVE to take those courses in order to be taking the most rigorous curriculum. Some of those schools may have some great teachers who are not teaching the AP courses, where the time would have been better spent than inadequately covering AP material with a mediocre or worse teacher. </p>

<p>I"ve been told that it’s four APs, if they are the heavy duty ones, are fine. I know that our school, though it will order any AP test for anyone asking for it, does not have as many APs as a number of the public schools around here. That, is, each year, the kids taking the tests tend to take them in a few select subjects, English LIt and grammar, US His, Calc AB/BC, Physics, Bio, Chem, languages, Art History, Studio Art. Those are the standard, and there may be a few kids taking others on a singular basis. The catholic highschool and public school here, have a much longer list with kids taking all kinds of APs, including Econ, Comp Sci, Psychology, Govt, Env. Science, etc. It seems to me that the heavy duty academic ones are the former, and those are what carry the most weight with the select schools.</p>

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<p>Regardless of whether the courses in question are labeled AP, IB, honors, or some school-specific name, top students need and want to be in the same classes as the other top students. If AP is all your school has, take those courses. If not-very-well-taught AP is all your school has, take the courses but beware when it comes time to plan your college schedule. It might be a good idea to forfeit your AP credit and take the college’s introductory course in a subject if the subject is important to you and if you have any doubts about the quality of your AP course.</p>

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<p>I don’t know about you guys…but kids I know who have graduated from my school have said their AP class were MUCH harder than their college classes… people at schools like BC, the UCs, Villanova, and even a few of the Ivys.</p>

<p>I wish I didn’t have to take the tests. My US History class was rediculous, but emphasized different material than was on the test. Most kids did bad in the class because it was so hard, and worse on the test.</p>

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<p>“Isn’t it more sensible to have a few REAL APs, actually taught at a true college level, than cram in a dozen that are really just mile-wide, inch deep survey courses?”</p>

<p>I assume the question is purely rhetorical. The problem, however, is due to the AP curriculum and the AP exam format. My older S, who took honors history classes in 9th and 10th grades felt that he learned more about how to do research and write history essays than in his APUSH class. That’s because the teachers were not trying to prepare the students for the AP exams and insisted on their writing papers, submitting drafts, revising them. in other words, working like college students. The AP class was a step backward. Every once in a while, students were given MC tests which emphasized memorization.</p>

<p>That is not to say that all college classes are of the highest quality. Many introductory classes are survey classes, and some rely excessively on MC tests. But many college profs do complain that high-scoring students are not able to synthesize what they learned in AP classes. I’ve heard this from social sciences profs and from profs in the natural sciences.</p>