All honors freshman take HUG at our school. I don’t know the distribution overall but my two kids got a 4 and a 5 and it seemed to be good prep for further social studies APs
Alternatively, I’d posit it’s because there are kids taking the class who should not be. When the College Board in its infinite wisdom (sarcasm) eliminated AP Physics B and replaced it with AP Physics 1 and 2, many HS’s dropped honors physics, and AP Physics 1 became the intro physics course. As a result, the number of test takers doubled the first year that AP Physics 1 was introduced compared to the previous year’s Physics B exam. Most of them had no previous exposure to physics.
Additionally, AP Physics 1 is more conceptual, where AP Physics B was more plug-n-chug math. That change is fine, but I’m not convinced that the teachers understood this distinction the first couple of years and adapted accordingly. Although now, 4 years in, the teachers should have made any necessary adjustments.
AP distribution by grade:
Some observations:
Subject: 9th Grade - 10th Grade - 11th Grade - 12th Grade
AP Physics 1: 1,694 - 13,732 - 101,568 - 50,899
AP Physics 2: 36 - 990 - 7,065 - 16,533
AP Biology: 4,343 - 35,118 - 99,740 - 111,297
AP Chemistry: 274 - 14,944 - 90,633 - 51,006
AP Human Geo.: 120,372 - 33,285 - 15,780 - 19,165
I think it is hard to find good physics teachers. People who love physics might be employed as teachers but not be especially capable of actually teaching. Our school turnover rate for physics teachers seems high. Getting teachers who can teach 1/2, SL and HL IB, and C, must be a big ask. Physics 1 over 1 year should not have such poor results. The group that takes this will be self selected.
I teach/have taught the following 5 AP courses I the social sciences. I would rank most to least difficult in this order at MY school:
AP Euro: we teach it to freshmen. It’s a whole new world
APUSH: sophomores- about 1/2 are new to the process. If I had my druthers I would flip APUSH to freshmen (it’s 1country, and they live in - better context)
AP Gov
AP World - an elective for jr/Sr - if you’ve taken Euro you are WAY ahead of the game
AP Comp Gov - elective for seniors. If you are interested in global politics/current events you are ahead of the game. Very vocab based
Last year, around 60%of my Euro kids scored, around 70% of my APUSH kids did. I did not teach Gov last year (last time I did my score rate was over 80%). For the past two years all my world and Comp Gov kids have scored.
I was surprised that APES also had a low pass rate. What do you suppose is the reason for that? More 9th and 10th graders taking the class because it is supposed to be easy?
I have to say that I get peeved when APES is discussed as a “worthless” and easy AP course. I worked in an field related in many ways to environmental science and I thought the course content was useful for this changing world and that the content was pretty rigorous (my daughter took it last year as a soph).
At my daughter’s school, AP World is the most difficult non-STEM AP because of the teacher. I’ve heard of kids failing the class but passing the exam. That doesn’t seem quite right.
The course content for APES isn’t standardized.
CB gives certain standards and criteria, but schools can submit their own course descriptions for approval. There are “curricular and resource requirements,” but teachers can submit their own syllabus or follow a sample (and later modify that.)
Hmmm. Don’t AP courses use AP textbooks?
Given the definitions, I think the classifications are fine. It’s in the actual implementation that you run into problems. For example, the “hard” sciences are more conceptually difficult than the “softer” classes, so even though BC may be stretched across two semesters in HS, the content is examined in detail than AB+BC. D18 is solving HW problems in BC that are more difficult than the problems I had in Engineering Calculus II in college (a million years ago). I don’t like it. I think kids at her age should be focusing on understanding what they’re doing and why more than grinding through a half-page derivation.
The “soft” classes can be made difficult due to the amount of work piled onto kids. D18 hasn’t taken any of them other than AP Lit. She loves the teacher and is breezing through it. Her friends have taken other “soft” AP classes and the workload is significant. I think that’s equally as pointless as the difficult BC HW problems.
Finally, the teacher makes a big difference. That way hammered home last year in D18’s AP Chem class. She went from liking Honors Chem to hating AP Chem. All of the kids in the class were about to go on strike. It was the first class D18’s taken in K-12 that had us thinking about contacting the Principal to complain. It was that bad. Note that the teacher is no longer teaching AP Chem…
Does such a thing even exist? If so, we didn’t use them.
CB has recommendation lists of textbooks. Eg, for ES: “appropriate for college students enrolled in introductory courses in environmental science.” Different courses can have different wording about how texts make the list (and you may still get approval even without one of those.)
This, for anyone who wants a look https://cb.collegeboard.org/ap-course-audit/teacher.html
^ Ah that makes more sense. I assumed it meant that CB is now putting out specific textbooks (which wouldn’t surprise me in the least)
My daughter is taking AP Bio and Stats now and both of her textbooks have a big “AP” logo on the front cover. Many (but not all) of the suggested textbooks on the CB website (#50) have “AP” in the title, so it looks to me like courses are standardized to some extent.
But I did look at the course and exam description on the CB website (#50) and there WAS a huge difference in the course description between APES and World History. The description for APES was 27 pages long with a short list of curriculum topics (although all of the topics had a long list of sub-topics) and the World History description was 233 pages! with a list of topics and curriculum guidelines that went on forever! There was a copious amount of descriptive material on the key concepts and learning objectives for World History, while with APES there was next to nothing.
So yeah, that explains why the pass rate is lower in APES than World History - APES teachers don’t have much direction at all regarding how to develop a curriculum that will prepare students for the exam.
Just because a text has AP in the title does not make them “good.” Many of the better texts on the “suggested” list are standards at the college level as well, e.g. Mankiw for econ, Campbell for bio. I think any of my HS teachers would walk on hot coals before ordering a text with AP in the title.
I’ve said many time before: IMO, the hardest history AP is the one that is taken first. While the material is different between USH, Euro, and World, the test strategies are similar. If one survives the first class, the next is a relative breeze.
I think that the prerequisites for the corresponding college course need to be taken into account, as well as the length of the course in college. Quantum statistical mechanics is taught in a single semester at most universities, but that wouldn’t make it a light AP course, even if it were taught over a full year in high school (ha, ha).
An AP course where a high school freshman can walk into the course with no unusual preparation and succeed is probably light, in my view. (Human geography?)
The languages differ from most of the other APs in that it is not possible to take the AP course without some prior background in the language. It would be a very unusual high school freshman who was ready for the AP Latin. That’s not impossible, but it would certainly require prior Latin. There are plenty of students who foundered on Vergil, despite 3 or 4 years of Latin ahead of that. In my opinion, when AP Latin yields one semester of college credit, the reason is that it’s being equated to the course in the Aeneid, which is one semester. But a college student who had not taken Latin before would not plunge into that course as the first Latin course. (Not hardly)
In regards to Human Geography at my daughter’s school you had to have a certain score on her ACT Explore (now PSAT 8/9) as a freshman. For the kids she knew they were honors kids. I can’t speak for other schools. The prerequisite for Comp Sci Principles was a minimum accelerated Geometry. While not the highest math you could be in it would still lead to BC senior year. To me though the bottom line is if you don’t get a 3,4, 5 on the test (50% didn’t in Human Geography) what was the point? The same goes for all the other AP courses.
At my DS18’s school AP Stats is quite challenging as is AP Lit but AP Physics 1, AP Enviro and AB Calc were not for him. I think a lot depends of what the teacher/school wants the course to include and involve in terms of students’ learning.
@LeastComplicated “At my daughter’s school, AP World is the most difficult non-STEM AP because of the teacher. I’ve heard of kids failing the class but passing the exam. That doesn’t seem quite right.”
D20’s school has two APWH teachers. D got the hard one. Few students score above a C, but the test pass rate is around 90%. Few students in the other teacher score below a C but the test pass rate is around 70%. Even though D is skating on a B/C, I’m glad she got the hard teacher. (Another teacher told me that the kids who had the hard APWH teacher tend to think APUSH is easy while the kids who had the easy teacher think APUSH is hard - quality counts.)
In Canada, physics is a 2 year sequence in grades 11 and 12 (prior to that it’s taught as part of integrated science starting in middle school). Most students taking AP Physics 1 take it in place of the grade 12 “honours” (U in Ontario) level course. At DS19’s school they have a Pre-AP program leading up to the AP courses which accelerates the regular curriculum. As a result they will have covered most of the grade 12U curriculum before taking AP Physics 1, just as they would have if they were taking it in first year university. That may account for much of the difference in scoring between Canada and the US:
AP Physics 1 Mean Score US - 2.36 Percentage Scoring 3,4,5 - 40.64%
AP Physics 1 Mean Score Canada - 3.31 Percentage Scoring 3,4,5 - 74.53%