<p>"Aiming to open access to college-level Advanced Placement courses, the school switched to a computer-based lottery to distribute spaces … The new system caused an uproar among families whose children failed to get into AP courses …</p>
<p>‘IM DESPERATE ILL GIVE YOU FREE FOOD,’ one student, Kirk Hum, posted on the 210-member AP Flea Market Facebook group." …</p>
<p>“But the College Board, which runs the AP program and is encouraging open access, said the effort has generally been successful. Even though national participation has doubled in the last decade to 2.1 million students last year, exam failure rates have increased only slightly, officials said. Passing scores have outpaced failing results by nearly 20% over the last decade.”</p>
<p>Of course the College Board wants more students to take AP tests, at $89/pop, because they want to make more money!</p>
<p>Failing an AP class cannot be good for the student quoted on the first page of the article. I assume that will hurt her chances of getting into college and her $89 test fee will be completely wasted because I assume there is no way she’ll pass the test.</p>
<p>I’m all for allowing any student to take any course but if schools really want “open gates” they have to have the resources to accept however many students sign up for the AP classes. Having a lottery is ridiculous. In addition, teachers should not dumb down the classes to accommodate students who fall behind.</p>
<p>My kids’ HS allowed anyone to take AP classes and I never heard of a student not getting into an AP class if the student wanted in. The only problems were scheduling issues where classes were only held one or two periods a day and conflicted with the AP classes (band is one example - it conflicted with the one periord of AP Computer Science).</p>
<p>“More schools opening Advanced Placement courses to all students”</p>
<p>That is a misleading headline, since the school in question is rationing spaces in AP courses by lottery, rather than what it was doing before. So they are not open to “all” students, unless they open up enough AP courses for all students who want to take them.</p>
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<p>Odd that the writer only mentions white and black students, given that Los Angeles Unified is 75% Latino, leaving both white and black students as small minorities.</p>
<p>My younger daughters inner city high school allowed any student who was ready to take AP to do so. Not all teachers required students to take the AP test. Students were taking a mixture of grade level, honors, AP and sometimes below grade level courses concurrently, whatever was appropriate.</p>
<p>This school is well known to the colleges and a great many students attend top schools.
For students on FRL, I believe the PTA may help to cover the test fees.</p>
<p>Outrageous. Can you imagine a regular course where 60 percent of students received a D or F but nothing was done to either restructure the course or better limit the kids allowed to take it? All this tells me is that the school wasn’t being very discriminating as to who they allowed to take the class in the first place.</p>
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<p>The Latino kids probably fall somewhere between White and AA kids in the range but the author didn’t mention their scores because she was indicating the highest and lowest.</p>
<p>What does “exam pass rate” mean? Isn’t the exam scored on a 5 point scale? What is considered “passing?”</p>
<p>At our high school, AP students recieve course grades independent of the AP exam score. So theoretically, a student can score a 0 on the exam but recieve an A in the course</p>
<p>Ok, thanks. I know there were kids at our high school who didn’t really care about the exam score because it was not tied to the course grade. They only cared about the course grade because AP courses recieve an extra gpa point “bump” in CA. In other words, a B in AP history translates to a 4.0, an A to a 5.0.</p>
<p>The school gets credit for passing with a 3 on any AP exam. So the school statistics say 2000 exams administered with 1000 passing or something like that with a pass rate of 50%. The lower the pass rate, the worse the school looks but then school districts want to claim APs are hard and we are doing a great job by getting students a thousand college class credits.</p>
<p>AP courses vary so widely from school to school and community to community. At some schools, kids routinely receive an A in an AP class thus increasing their weighted GPA AND score a 3 or less on the exam. In other schools, kids struggle to get B’s in the course but routinely scores 4’s and 5’s on the exam. Which is better? Depends if you’re looking for a GPA bump or looking for college credit.</p>
<p>Once all HS courses, including knitting and baton twirling, will be AP courses, ETS will invent a super AP, and again pretend the new beasts are college level courses. </p>
<p>In the meantime, our schools will continue to graduate quasi illiterates, even after compiling a despicable dropout rate. </p>
<p>AP has been a part of the problem, and offered no solution at all. It should be drastically curtailed, restricted to senior year, removed from college applications, and colleges should stop offering credit and only allow advanced placement.</p>
<p>A kid is still required to do well in school irrespective of how well they do in AP. The only thing measured by AP score is the strength of the curriculum and when a kid gets a B in school but a 5, it means the students are much better prepared compared to the AP exam.</p>
<p>The teachers throw a lot of busy work at students to meet the AP prescribed teaching. It is easy to miss a couple of assignments and get a B in a competitive school/class.</p>
<p>^^^I agree. My kids get a lot out of the AP classes they’ve taken. At our HS, these are very rigorous and are restricted to kids who deserve to be taking them. Each kid has to “apply” to get in an AP class. The criteria is usually an A in the honors course that precedes the AP class. For example, an A in honors precalc is a prerequisite for AP Calc. For classes like AP psych, a kid has to get the thumbs up from the head of the department.</p>
<p>Most AP tests have 35% to 50% non-pass rates (1 or 2 scores). Assuming that the high schools are giving D and F grades to that many students in AP courses, it does indicate that the high schools are either grading AP courses less stringently than the AP tests, or are not teaching in the AP courses the full content of what is tested on the AP tests.</p>
<p>It is likely that the reverse is more common – i.e. A in AP course but 1 or 2 on the AP test.</p>
<p><a href=“File Library”>File Library; is the AP reports of the Houston Independent School District. Starting on page 8 of the 2011-2012 report are charts comparing course grades to AP test scores. For many AP courses, the modal AP test score for students getting A grades in the AP course is 1.</p>
Without being too cynical, isn’t the College Board watering down the courses? I’ve heard anecdotally that it’s much easier to “pass” an AP test now than it was back in the day. I’ve also heard that it’s much easier to get a 5, and it’s not really reflective of college-level work.</p>
<p>Absent a definition of “pass” that is dependent upon the mastery of the material, not the grading of the test, the College Board’s claims aren’t meaningful. Moreover, they fly in the face of most test-taking statistics: when you add more people, you generally lower the overall scores, as the new group is usually less qualified, on the average, than the very self-selected previous group.</p>
<p>My kids’ schools are more like what big daddy is referring to while the rest are where students are being forced to take the test because district is requiring them to and paying for it and letting them fail because they want to bring up the standards of teaching in other schools offering AP but students had not been taking the test.</p>
<p>No real reason to disagree with the above, but that ignores a different facet of the issue. It is no doubt that strong students can (and do) benefit from advanced courses. Yet, there is nothing that confirm that the TYPE of courses that serve the AP monster are indeed the most adequate courses that COULD and SHOULD be given. Private high schools that do not have to address the whims of school boards and parental pressure to keep up with the Jones’ have long relied on a stronger, more developed, and better aligned curriculum in the form of honors and advanced classes. Countries that leave us in the dust are NOT focusing on that AP boondoggle, or on that poor ■■■■■■■ program (IB) that was massively adapted to the US appetite for divisions and exlusions.</p>
<p>The real problem, however, is not what people “get out of it” and which is in fact little to nothing that pretending the courses that one inch deep and mile wide are beneficial to a college education, but that it precludes the development of real comprehensive programs. As it stands, the AP/IB programs mostly serve to deliver the “school within a school” by separating the students, and offer a private school copycat to a public school crowd. </p>
<p>And this comes at the expense of the students who really deserve the best teachers and the most attention. Obviously, those “best teachers” prefer the segregared environment, and the financial windfall that comes from being a sought-after AP teacher. </p>
<p>All in all, the little redeeming value in the AP program is transcended by its nefarious impact on our education system. Just another angle of how dysfunctional a system rigged by insiders can be!</p>
<p>As usual, in America, we only do the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives. And this one is pretty bad!</p>