College Board's Transition from Physics B AP to Physics 1/2 AP an Epic Failure?

Test Preparation AP Sciences
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From everything I’ve seen, it looks like the transition from AP Physics B to AP Physics 1/2 has been a failure of epic proportions for the College Board.

Trevor Packer tweeted recently that nearly double the students took Physics 1 vs the former Physics B. You’d think that’s a good thing. However, the problem is that many students were forced to take this class because their schools cancelled their honors physics classes (as the College Board advised them to). So instead of the more typical progression seen with chemistry and biology (honors then AP, if you really liked the subject), you had many students taking an AP-level Physics class as their first exposure to to the subject. The result? A historic low percentage of students demonstrating mastery of the material (merely 4.1% got 5’s) and a historic high failure rate (63.1% with 2’s or 1’s). The College Board has now given the false impression to many tens of thousands of US students with a demonstrated interest in science that they are not cut out for it.

Even worse, those few students who were lucky enough to have teachers who were able to properly prepare them for this test have been harmed too. In our local high school they used to offer two physics classes (Honors and Physics B). They then replaced Honors Physics with Physics 1, promising students they would offer Physics 2 the next year. In theory, it sounded great. You get the same two-year progression, but with a coherent curriculum spread out between two years. Less duplication, etc. etc. But guess what? Not enough students signed up for Physics 2, so they are not offering it next year. (Some students weren’t as interested in physics as other sciences, while other students – the type that might have skipped right into Physics B in the past – didn’t feel like spending two full years studying an algebra-based physics curriculum). As a result, the school’s students are stuck with one physics class, Physics 1, which may be more in depth in some areas, but also covers fewer fundamental physics topics than the honors class alone had in the past. I’m sure this experience is not unique.

The two-year AP Physics track also harms students in other ways. Many students don’t traditionally take an AP science class until their junior year. Further, because high schools are cancelling their Honors Physics classes (as the College Board said to), if you want to take an advanced level physics in high school, most likely you have to take Physics 1 AP. Moreover, because the algebra-based AP Physics track is now two years, many will be forced to take Physics 1 AP their junior year. That may force out another AP science that would otherwise have been taken that year. It is also difficult to take the Physics SAT subject test after Physics 1 AP because they don’t really match up. So, unless you are taking two advanced science courses during your junior year, which is difficult for many reasons, it could be very hard to get a good score on any SAT science subject test to submit. As a result, many science and engineering applicants could be left with a hole in their college applications.

Since the primary purpose of AP classes is often touted to be gaining college credit, I initially thought that the College Board’s decision to obliterate the standard high school physics curriculum was to ensure that more students actually get credit. But it looks like the EXACT OPPOSITE may be happening. Stanford has announced that, unlike for Physics B, their Physics department had determined that NO CREDIT will be given for either Physics 1 or Physics 2, no matter your test score. I haven’t checked to see whether other colleges are following suit, but Stanford’s view alone is enough to cause serious concern.

So I hope Trevor Packer and his colleagues are working over time right now to figure out how to fix this fiasco. Sadly, the damage is already done for the first generation of students already forced to take Physics 1.

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Fortunately, my HS did not drink this Kool-Aid and, in fact, has been eliminating AP classes over the years believing that their teachers can do a better job of teaching college-level classes without the constraints of the CB.

I have to believe that there are conversations happening at both the CB and at HS’s around the country, since I personally do not think that the results are line with anybody’s expectations. Having taken the Physics C exams a couple of years ago and the Physics B exam a year before that, I’m not that in tune with the changes since they would not affect me. I did, however, look at the FRQ from this year’s exams when it was released and, in my mind, the testing was appropriate. Perhaps having double the number of students taking Physics 1 vs. the historical Physics B is not a good thing as up to half probably should not have been taking an AP class in the first place.

The big issue I had with the change is mentioned in the original post; if HS’s follow the CB curriculum, there is not physics course which aligns with the subject test. Given that the hardcore STEM students would gravitate toward Physics C, not Physics 2, as their second physics class, many only have Physics 1 as preparation, and there are a lot of holes vs. the subject test.

FYI, Harvard also is not giving credit for AP Physics 1/2.

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CB loves money!!!

On a serious note, they really do. As much as they like to say they want kids to learn, they are foremost a for-profit company, and they are going to make a lot more money with the amount of people taking Physics 1.

On one hand, it made sense to me to split Physics B into two courses, since I believe many teachers are simply not capable of teaching ALL of the material in Physics B in a single year, but on the other hand, it presents a huge scheduling problem for many STEM students or even just people who are interested in physics. There’s now a huge dilemma to take Physics 2 to strengthen algebra based physics skill but waste another year on that basic material, or to go on to Physics C with less prep than they would have had in the past in an attempt to get credit. In addition, it persuades many people who are not ready for an AP class and test to take the class and they end up doing poorly. I really hope they revise their plan; this was clearly NOT a good revision, and is going to have a lot of consequences that will take awhile to fix.

Either way, I’m glad that I took Physics B in the last year that it was available and escaped the guinea pig experience people will be going through with Physics 1/2. It’s also unfortunate that Honors Physics is being phased out, though my school district (who has been, unfortunately, wholeheartedly gulping down CB’s Kool-aid these past years), eliminated that class years ago.

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Someone should send this post to John Oliver so he can have a college board episode (if u haven’t seen his standardized testing episode u r missing out)

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Yeah, Physics 1 sucks, that why I self studied Physics C during this year while taking Physics 1 to make sure I get some kind of credit for my efforts. I also had to self study quite a bit to get my 800 on the Subject Test.

tl;dr Collegeboard is making people self study a lot

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Great comments. I’ll add that there had been a long-time problem of a disconnect between AP classes and the college admissions process. Students spend a whole year preparing for a test that isn’t directly taken into account in their applications. Rather, it is the SAT II that the top colleges specifically request. Because they don’t specifically prepare for that test in an AP class, the only solution is self-study.

Then, you have AP Physics 1/2 thrown into the mix and it makes things twice as bad. As mentioned, most will probably have only taken the first year of Physics before they have to submit their college applications. And even if a student completes the two years of Physics by the end of junior year, the first half of the material will have been learned more than a year ago and thus be somewhat stale. In either case, a student will have to undertake significant self-study if they want to demonstrate their skill on the physics subject test. (And, as mentioned, in the local high school, the ONLY advanced physics offered is AP Physics 1, so the students there are pretty much on their own.) The result is made even worse because a two-year physics track tends to crowd out other advanced sciences that may have been taken junior year. So taking the Physics subject test with extensive self-preparation may be the only option for many STEM students.

I’ve had two children go through the college application process and not once have I ever heard anyone with direct knowledge of college admissions say that what AdComs most want is students to demonstrate their ability to SELF-STUDY for core subjects. Independent research is one thing, but forcing students to self-study a core science like physics (one that could and should be fully covered in their high schools) is ridiculous.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think the skills that are taught in AP classes are terrific for college preparation. It just seems an INCREDIBLE waste for students to then be forced to go out and buy third-party prep books to try to figure out what the College Board has deemed it important for them to know on a multiple choice test. Is that really what we want our best and brightest to be doing with their time?

So, who’s to blame? Well, pretty much everyone involved.

First, I blame the AdComs for not pushing back. They see a correlation between high SAT subject scores and successful college performance so that is enough for them to consider them. They appear to have no genuine concern for the actual disruptive (and time-wasting) impact these tests may have on student’s lives (especially now that there is an even greater disconnect between their classes and these tests than before). Saying the tests are not mandatory is not enough to eliminate this disruption. If a test is something that is considered, the top students will feel they are mandatory enough to at least take it. I also blame the universities for not directly participating in the development of the AP Physics curriculum. 100,000+ of our top students just took Physics 1 and it turns out they never had a chance of getting college credit at either Stanford or Harvard (and perhaps a host of other schools).

Second, I blame the College Board (of course). They lost the forest for the trees here. Maybe their studies are correct and this new way is truly a better way to teach physics. However, you have to stand back and understand, as a practical matter, how this fits in with the standard high school curriculum and the overall college application process. Somehow they convinced themselves that a two-year track would work. They then sold high schools on the idea that the honors physics students would all do great in AP Physics 1 instead (wrong) and that Physics 2 and/or AP Physics C would be available for the most advanced students to round out their knowledge (if offered, and likely not in time for SAT II preparation). And, since no credit is being given at some colleges it appears that the new AP Physics track doesn’t fit within the standard college curriculum either.

Third, and perhaps most, I blame the high schools, school boards, and by association, parents like me. It is our students’s school, not the College Board’s. We have to do what is best for the students. We are the ones who see what they go through every day. The College Board cannot duplicate that in their studies. Education, like real estate, is local. Just because the College Board claims to have a better way doesn’t mean we should blindly follow it.

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I have to agree with skieurope. My son’s school is small so they cancelled preAP (Honors) Physics this past year and as the CB advised only offered AP Physics 1/2. So my son took it and did very well in the class, making an A both semesters, but scored a 2 on the AP test. He thought he did well. He’s just a sophomore so we told him not to worry about it. The juniors and seniors in his class were fortunate enough to have had the preAP class before taking the AP Class. What is the CB trying to do to our kids? Very frustrating.

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I’m curious about how the Physics 1 test seems to have aligned so poorly for kids who studied based on those sections of the old Physics B textbooks/prepbooks. Was it more/less conceptual? More/less algebraic? More/less memorization?

My son took Physics B as a freshman the last year it was offered. That worked great for him, because he’d done some trig in geometry in 8th grade and some vectors for some projects of his own. He loved the class and wants to major in physics.

This year, they offered Physics 1 to a larger number of freshmen than had taken Physics B the previous year. (And that had been a big Physics B group, because kids didn’t want to wait and be the guinea pigs.) A lot of parents have reported that their normally high-scoring 9th graders got low grades in Physics 1 and/or had to have outside tutoring. I would guess their AP test scores were also low. Part of the problem was that the geometry curriculum had been modified–without telling the physics teacher–so that these kids had never seen or used sine and cosine in 8th grade geometry. (And these were the last year of kids where the high math group got 8th grade geometry; next year only a few kids will even see geometry in 9th grade.) I don’t know enough about the Physics 1 class/test to know what the rest of the problem was. But, there are a fair number of bright kids who now have a C dragging down their GPA, because the school sold the parents on the idea that this was the appropriate science class for their kids. (And, I guess the College Board sold that to the school.)

The school hasn’t had an Honors Physics class for years, in an attempt to get a better racial balance in the “college prep” physics class and the AP classes. (Didn’t really work.) With the advent of Physics 1/2, the terrible scores, and the slowing down of the math sequence, it is unlikely that they will ever offer Physics C. (A class doesn’t “make” unless 25 kids sign up.)

They will continue to have the “college prep” physics class, because many kids need a way to have a non-mathematical treatment of physics in order to meet the graduation requirement.

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This was my only AP test I ever got less than a four on. I have taken 6. Honestly, I was really excited to take Physics at first lol…

I got a one. A ONE. The problem is was that the material given in class was literally nothing like the actual test so I was caught completely off guard and well, failed miserably.

I was having a dilemma between going to Premed/STEM/Engineering or Finance and AP Physics 1 solidified my decision. I’m taking a regular science course next year and probably will never take a physics class ever again. I’m definitely not intelligent enough to be a STEM major lol. I did really well on all my other tests but they were mostly humanities, so I’ll probably major in something like that or finance. I’m pretty good at theoretical mathematics too.

Idk I guess science isn’t my thing lol. Got a 1 on this test and a 29 on the ACT Science (lowest by far)…

What a nightmare.

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As I said above, the FRQ’s looked to be quite doable, so I do not think this is this issue.

This is what I think is the larger issue. AP classes are college-level classes, and if twice as many kids took the AP Physics 1 test TY vs the AP Physics B test LY, that leads me to believe that a large chunk of these kids were pushed into taking an AP class by parents/teachers/themselves before they were ready. The HS freshman/sophomore who performs well on an AP exam is the exception, not the rule, as noted by the low percentage of 5’s in AP Human Geo, AP World History, and now, AP Physics 1

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@Ynotgo This year’s Physics I was more conceptual, less algebraic, and less memorization. It was different because it was not enough to simply know and understand physics principles- you had to be able to synthesize and apply those principles to situations you had likely never seen before. Applying concepts in unique ways was what probably threw most people off, as I would imagine that a lot of teachers had the typical rigid practice problems that over time because predictable. This exams required synthesis of various concepts in different ways.

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The exam was mostly theory with very little math.

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Shrimps’ description is what happened with my S’s AP physic’s 1 class. He said after the exam that his teacher failed to properly prepare the class for the subject matter and style of the test, so he expects everyone did poorly.

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Some schools are making it work. May D’s school teaches Physics 1/2 as one class and she got a 5 on Physics 1 and a 4 on Physics 2. I expect her classmates got similar scores.

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They’re making it work because they did not drink the Kool-Aid. Teaching Physics 1/2 as one course runs counter to the CB’s “advice.”

http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/members/exam/exam_information/225589.html

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@skieurope

But our school never had an intro or honors or Pre AP Physics it always just been AP Physics and Physics C they didn’t have room to add another class to make it AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2. I guess I’m just not seeing how our public school can successfully teach Physics 1/2 in one class period when other schools are failing to teach the same material in twice the time?

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Our class never had any honors courses anyways. You got regular or AP, and I don’t think we even offered Physics B or C before that. We MIGHT have offered Physics B before, but now we only have Physics 1.

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May have been just an isolated experience, but I self-studied for the Physics 1 exam after a year of regular-level physics and got a 5. I am very good in physics though (I got my highest grades so far in my two semesters of physics).
Could just be that the depth of material covered was a huge difference from Phys B. Phys 1/2 had less material covered than B, so the CB probably made it harder in terms of solving the actual problems.
Basically, the new courses seem ideal for students who excel in algebra and physics. And besides, other science courses have high-ish rates of failures anyway. Bio has a 35% fail rate, Chem a 48%, and Env. Sci a 55%. These courses are just very in-depth, I suppose.

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This is a really interesting dilemma to consider. I wasn’t really aware of the AP Physics 1/2 controversy until recently.

Some background: I graduated high school in 2011. I took AP Physics B my junior year of high school. I self-studied for both AP Physics C exams my senior year. My high school did not offer AP Physics C, but I wanted to pursue an engineering major in college and place out of freshman-level physics. My views here are those of a relatively uninformed outsider.

AP Physics B already offered too much material to be taught in one semester. I believe that the exam required knowledge of classical mechanics, E&M, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, sound, optics, and nuclear physics. This corresponds to three semesters of algebra-based physics in college, compressed into eight months of a high school class, give or take a couple of weeks depending on school start date. The class itself was insane, and we had to self-teach nuclear because we simply did not have time to cover it in school.

The issue with AP Physics B is that the credit is generally useless for anything but majors with a science elective requirement. Engineering majors cannot use it because it is not calculus-based, and pre-med students cannot use it because most med schools, from what I understand, do not accept AP credit for the science and math requirements. Even if you had planned on using the Physics B credit as science elective credit, I would assume that more students would take AP Biology or AP Chemistry for that purpose. (More than twice as many students took bio than physics B in 2014, and 50% more took chem than physics B.)

The question is, then, how many high school students want to commit two years of high school coursework on AP Physics 1 and 2, exams that will do little to no good for them in college? As other posters have implied, it seems like a lot of schools are going to see heavily reduced enrollment in AP Physics 2 because 1. schools are pressuring students that are not ready for AP Physics to take the class, who then lose faith in their STEM abilities, and 2. students may want to take a different science course—bio, chem, or environmental science.

I obviously do not have the expertise of the College Board, but I just can’t understand why they thought that turning AP Physics B into a two-year course would be a good idea. I would have proposed that they remove material from the death march that is AP Physics B in some sort of a curriculum overhaul, but keep it as a one-semester course.

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Great post Keasbey. You raise some very insightful points. As you say, it’s not just a matter of credit/no credit, but of whether the credit will count toward your major or graduate school prerequisites. But even then, some may find AP’s helpful for placement irrespective of credits so that is another factor. Still others really don’t care either way because they intend to start with the beginning of the Physics track irrespective of whether their college would have let them skip it. I remember taking the “Chem 101” class as a freshman. It seemed the vast majority (even way back when) had taken AP Chem in high school. Having only taken honors chem (AP Chem wasn’t offered at my high school) I felt at a distinct disadvantage.

I think the basic premise of the AP program – taking college-level classes in high school to save you money and/or time in college – doesn’t really work that well when it comes to the sciences. This is particularly true as it applies to Physics because of the algebra/calculus dichotomy. It’s hard to do college level physics without calculus and most high school students don’t take calculus until their senior year.

So that takes us back to a couple of more fundamental questions - 1) what is the optimal science curriculum/progression for a top high school student (whether they intend to pursue a STEM major in college or not), and 2) how do we want Physics to fit into that? It’s hard to really figure that out (and may be worth a separate thread).

In this case it appears the College Board assumed most students took the honors (or intro) physics to Physics B track. They wanted those students to spend those same two years simply studying the Physics B material in more depth. But it also appears, for whatever reasons, many students took Physics 1 who were not prepared to do so.

And to respond to RandyButternub’s post, while most of the sciences have fairly high failure rates, Physics 1 was historically high this year. You also have to consider the change in passing rates from Physics B. Looking at the numbers from 2013 (which are in the AP Report to the Nation), the Physics B failure rate was only 40%. A sudden jump to 63% is a huge increase. Further, with Physics B only about 27 thousand students failed in 2013. But with Physics 1 you not only had the percentage increase but twice as many people taking the test, so probably over 85 thousand students failed. That’s 60 thousand more kids who have now been given the false impression that they will never be cut out for the more advanced sciences. (The mean grade also dropped from 2.84 with Physics B to 2.25 with Physics 1.) Physics B used to be one of the AP sciences for which students were most prepared. Physics 1 is now by far the science for which students are least prepared. Whatever the College Board’s goals for the revamp included, I can’t imagine that was one of them.