An easy way to make the scores go up is to require a regular level physics course before AP Physics 1. That’s what my school did and our class was alright with both the AP class and exam.
While true, this then circles back to “What should the physics curriculum look like for HS students?” A 3-year track is unreasonable with the other science and non-science requirements for graduation and “recommendations” for college admissions.
I found the 2014 statistics so I can now do a direct comparison to the results for the last year Physics B and the first year of Physics 1. They look terrible for the College Board. (Note I don’t know the actual number of Physics 1 test takers, but Trevor Packer said “nearly double” so I just doubled 2014.)
Course (year)…Total Tests…5’s (%)…5’s (#)…Failed (%)…Failed (#)…Avg Score
Physics B (2014)…93,574…15.8%…14,759…39.3%…32,075…2.89
Physics 1 (2015)…187,148…4.1%…7,673…63.1%…118,090…2.25
Most striking is that, despite the number of testtakers doubling, the number of students earning a five actually dropped in half!
Second most striking is the increase of the total number of students who failed (perhaps as many as 86 thousand more kids)! I can only imagine the amount of resources school districts invested in these classes only to have so many more students fail than before.
The fact that this is a transition year may have something to do with this, so my next step will be to look at the results when they revamped AP Bio (when I have a moment). However, my sense is that transition went much more smoothly than this one.
It looks like the transition to the redesigned AP Bio test had none of the problems seen in Physics this year:
Course (year)…Total Tests…5’s (%)…5’s (#)…Failed (%)…Failed (#)…Avg Score
Bio Old (2012)…191,773…19.7%…37,813…49.0%…94,041…2.73
Bio New (2013)…162,381…12.7%…20,580…44.5%…72,183…2.77
While total test takers and number of 5’s dropped substantially, the failure rate actually dropped and the average score rose.
So merely having to deal with a redesigned curriculum, isn’t enough to explain the Physics 1 numbers this year.
At my school they told everyone to skip honors and go straight to AP. They said the redesigned test was similar to honors curriculum and would be a breeze for most AP students…boy were they wrong. The few people that passed at my school got 3’s to my current knowledge. AP Physics 1 is the only one we offer out of AP Physics 2 and C so we’re all moving over to AP Biology or AP Chemistry next year if we didn’t take it sophomore or junior year. To add to the injury the prep books I got for the exam helped little to none. I wish they would’ve stressed how the exam would be entirely conceptual and only 2 or 3 questions would be calculation based.
My school’s situation is very similar to @Gatortristan’s. Many of my friends and I went into AP Physics 1 with absolutely no prior knowledge of physics, and were told that since my teacher gets a pretty high pass rate on the former test, the new one should be okay. That was definitely NOT the case; so far I know most people got 1s and 2s, but only 2 people have gotten 3s ( one of them being me, my guessing skills were amazing that day apparently ). The test was so difficult, I can recall that on exam day many people just gave up on the test and starting drawing in the free response section lol.
The actual cutoffs for AP Physics 1 were:
**
5- 71%
4- 55%
3- 41%
2- 26%
**
So 1/3 of the students got less than 26% of the exam correct and almost 2/3 got less than 41% correct.
May I ask where did you find those percentages?
Wow, that blog post you linked to @skieurope seems to be praising the College Board for having increased the number of students who were able to pass the AP Physics test by 5900 this year.
I don’t accept that merely passing more students should be the goal of the AP program. I assume we want a healthy number of students who can demonstrate mastery (or near mastery) of the material. If a significant percentage of students cannot master the material in the high school setting, then we should leave it to actual college professors to teach it. In this case, the number of students getting a 4 or 5 went DOWN by over 3,000 despite an 82% increase in total test takers. A 3 on an AP Exam is the equivalent to a B- to C grade in college. It seems least 20% of students enrolled in a college class should be able to do better than that, right? (As an aside, the new AP Capstone seminar, which the College Board is strangely touting as a success, has a similar problem in that only 16.5% got at least a 4. But I’ll leave a discussion of that for another day.)
In any event, to make may point clear, let’s compare the total numbers from the last two years:
Physics B (2014) 4/5: 32,075 - 3: 24,753
Physics 1 (2015) 4/5: 28,730 - 3: 34,000
So yes, we increased the total number of students who were able to demonstrate that they were able to perhaps eek out a C in a college-level course, but comparatively few students are mastering this material now.
And consider the actual costs of gaining those 5900 Physics students who proved they could at least eek out a C:
According to @skieurope’s link, 76,000 additional students took AP Physics 1 this year. Assuming each class, on average, had 20 students take the test, that would have required schools to add about 3,800 new AP Physics classes this year (not counting AP Physics B classes converted to Physics 1).
According to the College Board it can cost $10,000 to start a new AP science course in a high school (ignoring teacher salaries and overhead). So starting all those new Physics 1 classes to cover the 76,000 additional test takers this year would have cost about $38 million. That breaks down to more than $6,400 PER ADDITIONAL STUDENT who was able to pass the exam this year vs last. For that same money, you could have paid for about 25 credits worth of classes at a state university for each of those fab 5,900. And again, that is not even accounting for teacher salaries and overhead.
Looking at it another way, the pass rate for all the ADDITIONAL students who took AP Physics 1 this year (vs. B), was only 7.7%. At 7.7%, you are talking about maybe 1 or 2 kids in each of the added Physics 1 classes who were able to meet the goal being set for them of demonstrating their ability to get at least a C in a college-level algebra-based Physics class.
Now you might say that this is just a hard class/test and that is a good thing because AP classes should be challenging. And, in fact, this all might be tolerable if the College Board had implemented a new way to teach algebra-based Physics that better aligns with the college curriculum. But it appears the exact opposite is true. As noted before, top college Physics departments (including Stanford, Harvard and now, apparently, Princeton) have decided to grant no credit or advanced standing for Physics 1/2, even though they historically had allowed it for Physics B.
In my view, the College Board officially went over the line here. It is one thing to simply offer high schools a prepackaged curriculum that they can either offer their students or not. It is quite another to tell them that they should cut non-AP classes from their offerings (in this case honors physics). This clearly has harmed our schools and our students and I think the College Board should be taken to task for it.
Why did College Board change from Physics B to Physics 1 and 2? When I was studying for the Physics 1 exam, all the current college textbooks I looked through were just like Physics B( the review books weren’t good for the exam, so I looked at some other textbooks). Yet, the College Board changed it to better reflect college coursework.
Not only that, but I haven’t even seen a college that gives Physics 1 and 2 credit but does not give Physics B credit.
I think its also worthy to note the percentage points needed to get certain scores (obtained by @skieurope 's link)
AP PHYSICS 1 GRADE Percentage of available points on the test
5 71%
4 55%
3 41%
2 26%
I got the impression that many (including my own) teachers believed the cutoffs for these scores were going to much lower. I know my teacher, in constant contact with other AP 1 teachers, believed 25% would be good enough for a 3 (and a 5 would be ~63%).
Do you think CB made the curve too harsh? I believe AP B’s cutoffs were less harsh for a supposed easier test.
@AlphaDragon, I’m not well-read on this topic, but if I had to guess, there are two main reasons.
- AP Physics B was heavily criticized as too focused on computation and not enough on conceptual understanding.
- AP Physics B tried to fit three semesters of college physics into an eight-month high school class.
@Zeppelin7, if you read the College Board’s explanation, the cutoffs are established using advanced statistical analysis intended to account for differences in difficulty from year to year. See http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/courses/11583.html. So if the cutoffs were higher this year, that means the College Board viewed this exam as simpler than the last Physics B exam.
In order for the AP distribution to have been the same this year as last three things would have had to occur: (1) the pool of students taking the test must have been of the same ability (and maturity), (2) their teachers must have been equally able to prepare them for the test, and (3) the statistical analysis used to equate and scale the test to prior tests must have been accurate.
Personally, I don’t attribute the problem to (3). The College Board has a lot of experience in doing this type of statistical analysis. It is the heart of literally everything they do. They could have made a massive error here, but it is unlikely.
Further, AP Physics 2 had even higher cutoffs for those who passed:
5: 73%
4: 61%
3: 42%
2: 23%
And yet, the students who took that test had a far more normal distribution of scores:
5: 8.4%
4: 14%
3: 32.8%
2: 34.9%
1: 9.9%
I’m no expert, but I think it is far more likely that the primary culprits are (1) and (2), i.e., an overnight expansion into a large student population that was too young and/or inexperienced to take this class/test, and a teacher population that was not properly trained to teach it.
The College Board has released the 2015 AP Data (http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/ap/data/participation/ap-2015), which contains the following information about AP Physics 1:
– I’d expected that a lot of younger kids taking it would have been part of the cause of low scores, because our HS taught it to a fairly large number of 9th graders. But, that does not seem to be the case: (https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2015/Program-Summary-Report-2015.pdf)
9th grade: 1,828 students
10th grade: 10,440
11th grade: 95,719
12th grade: 59,307
<9th grade: 66
– Mean score was 2.32. Lowest mean score, as is obvious from the previously published distribution. Standard deviation was 1.19. (https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2015/Student-Score-Distributions-2015.pdf)
– 6776 schools offered AP Physics 1, up from 5797 schools that offered AP Physics B in it’s last year. So, perhaps ~1000 new AP Physics teachers?
For comparison, 2014 AP Physics B participation by grade was as follows:
9th grade: 385
10th grade: 3,981
11th grade: 36,571
12th grade: 50,817
<9th grade: 41
So, that is still a lot more freshman and sophomores, even though the overall profile mainly shifted from 12th grade to 11th grade.