Impending Significant Change in AP Tests

mathinokc
Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:17:03 +0000

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True standardization is only happening if everyone is taking AP exams and schools are getting similar distributions of scores. I think there is a lot of “AP packaging” and not a lot of “AP achievement” going on…








And that’s one of the places where Jay Matthews gets it wrong. He measures tests taken and not scores received. So, that encourages schools to up the number of kids taking the exams without necessarily upping the number who are prepared for the exam. (He explains why he calculates things that way, but I don’t buy it.)

The AP readers say they can tell when they get to a school that pays for the exams (instead of the student paying) because they get a lot of blank free-response questions and/or drawings or just random writings. I don’t think that anyone gets any benefit from the exam being blown off like that.

I would guess you’d never get true standardization of the score distribution. All schools don’t have the same distribution of students as far as ability, background, etc. The top prep schools and most selective publics are always going to be at the top. The goal, though, should be to bring the non-selective urban publics and the rural schools up to the level of the suburban schools.

Even with the same set of students, the score distributions would still not be the same since not every teacher is as effective as every other and not every school has the same kind of resources. That’s true in college, too, though.