Impending Significant Change in AP Tests

marite
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:19:29 +0000

Xiggi:
I meant to say that you objected to other people’s claim that AP courses are like college courses, not that you claimed they are!

As for the 80% pass rate of the Bac, that is because a huge proportion of the students are allowed to leave school after 9th grade; not to drop out completely but to go on to vocational training. The 100% pass rate at my nieces’ prestigious lycee is due to to things:
–a rigorous entrance exam
–the retention of 1/3 of the 10th graders so they do not go on to take the first part of the bac at the end of the 11th grade before they have been made to repeat the whole 10th grade curriculum and only the strongest students are allowed to take the exam. By this logic, even at the most rigorously selective private lycee, the pass rate would be 60%.
Many French students take the bac multiple times.
I agree that the APs should not take up two weeks of instruction, especially for those students who need it most–i.e., the non-AP test takers. I agree, too, that the explosion of APs is ridiculous. And finally, I agree that as a nation, we lag behind other countries in terms of curricular rigor and educational achievements.
I happened to be talking to someone who is doing research on Chinese education just two days ago. She is amused by the American fixation on large classes as an important factor in under-achievement. In China, she claimed (and others around her agreed), it is not unusual to see 80 students in a single class in the best high schools: they are the ones that every family wants to send their kids to. The schools that have smaller class sizes are the under-chosen ones.