How does your school fairly handle the AP signups process?

Parents Forum
81

<p>bluebayou:</p>

<p>Obviously, each district works differently. In our high school, capped really means capped. My S’s GC tried to get him into a class that already had 30 students. The teacher wouldn’t budge, so a different schedule had to be devised. I’m almost certain that if 31 students had wanted to take an AP class, the school would have run two sections. One year, AP-chem had 30 students, but they had scheduling conflicts so the school ran two sections.
When I say the parents would have rebelled, they would have confronted the school, the school board, the superintendent, and most likely would have gotten their way. This happened not over AP but over IMP. Some parents wanted their children enrolled in IMP2 as 9th graders. That was not in the plan (principal was new and did not even know the difference between IMP and traditional math sequence). After 6 weeks of complaints, an IMP2 class was opened. By then, some students were in regular math classes, so the class had about 10-12 students.
I do think that the scenario presented by Eagle is arbitrary. I also think it is not very likely to happen in our public high school where getting more students into AP classes has become the mantra.</p>

82

<p>In our kids private HS, as long as there is a teacher & at least 4-5 kids who want the class, it has been taught, so far. My son has only 4 or 5 kids in his AP Comp AB class & several of his other APs have only about a dozen kids.</p>

<p>Over the summer, they may be assigned to read a book or two in many of their AP classes. For example in AP English, they read Crime & Punishment, AP Econ, they read “New Ideas from Dead Economists,” & “The Armchair Economist,” AP US they read “Crucible.”</p>

<p>Son didn’t find the summer AP reading too grueling (tho did have to force himself to plow through Crime & Punishment–still better over the summer than during the school year). AP CSci had nothing; AP Physics also had nothing. Math had nothing.</p>

<p>For “fun” son read “Freakonics” & “The World is Flat,” plus whatever else he could lay his hands on.</p>