Ha, ha, ha, ha!
This study shows that taking too many college-level courses in high school may not benefit much in college.
Good advice:
Re #301
Does not look like harm, just lack of correlation to any college GPA benefit.
Of course, the marginal ones going from 5 to 10 may be “AP lite” courses in many cases.
@ucbalumnus - 2 major things keep teachers away from ap: the grading, (I spend at least 10 hours grading essays every week, on top of any “regular” grading) and the pressure from parents/kids over grades. Someone above mentioned weekly emails- with some kids it’s daily. Some are whining, but many other are just NEEDY - high achieving kids are often high maintenance. I had a VERY sweet girl who emailed me EVERY DAY of 1st semester asking about grades, assignments, what would happen if we had a snow day, you name it. Her record was 6 emails on a Saturday. (She was getting ready for midterms)
I don’t think it is rigidity of curriculum that deters teachers in my district (or state) we have some
Pretty rigid directives from our state already (on of the things I like about ap is that they supersede state mandates). Nor is it the idea of being judged on the test- we have end of course exams - and THOSE results get published in newspaper
My daughter was one of those dumb jocks that got into Stanford because of too much time dedicated to athletics rather than academics. So if the child gets into Stanford, you assume all was well and there were no issues? That’s poor logic. My kids made a choice to sacrifice a balanced life and adequate sleep. I just don’t think that should be required to merely break into the top 10% of the class. D did not even make the top 3% of her class, despite taking all honors classes freshman and sophomore years, and AP’s junior and senior years.
Exactly. This is not about providing advanced students with more challenging work. This is about an arms race, a zero-sum game where everyone is trying to grab the brass ring, and it takes more and more to get it: not more deep intellectual pursuits, not more enriching or socially beneficial activities, but more credentials gotten for the sake of credentials, with the sacrifice of sleep, mental health, and in many cases intellectual depth.
For example, nobody takes BC Calculus and then AP Statistics because of a deep interest in mathematics. AP Stats is not a deep math class, but a series of arithmetical recipes for people who are unable to study statistics in a mathematically interesting way-- which should not include any student who has completed BC Calc. A student takes AP Stats after BC Calc just to check off another box.
Neither public high schools nor elite universities should be encouraging or supporting this arms race. It’s bad for students. It’s wasteful. Elite colleges want to choose the best students, but they should choose the best in a way that doesn’t promote suicide and depress intellectual independence.
How much of the arms race is reflective of the world outside of high schools and colleges? For example, how many jobs now require or strongly prefer applicants with bachelor’s degrees, even though the jobs require neither specific skills taught in bachelor’s degree programs nor more advanced thinking skills that are supposed to be practiced while studying in bachelor’s degree programs?
Or because the high school makes it difficult for the student to choose a different path (e.g. take a more advanced math course at a local college).
The other part of the arms race that is being described in these threads is the seemingly greatly increased amount of time and workload in high school, but the students are no more advanced than students a generation ago who did less work. The examples that I remember are:
a. Calculus. When I was in high school, students went straight from precalculus (usually in 11th grade, sometimes in 10th grade for the occasional top student in math) to calculus BC. Now, most posters describe a situation where students go from precalculus (in 10th grade) to calculus AB (in 11th grade) to calculus BC (in 12th grade).
b. Chemistry. When I was in high school, students took regular chemistry, then a one semester AP chemistry course. Now, it seems that students take honors regular chemistry, then a summer enrichment chemistry course, and then a full year of AP chemistry.
It looks like gratuitous amounts of work and time spent without really getting the students any further than they were before.
None of it, because the students who are sleeping four hours a night to complete 15 APs are not students who were ever in danger of not getting a bachelor’s degree.
Clearly, not everyone has an aptitude to become a STEM major in college (elite or not). If a HS student cannot handle taking 12 or more AP classes in HS and still have a balanced life then how in the world is that student able to succeed as a STEM major at any college?
It saddens me that so many CC’ers believe a student who does this has fallen into the “Rat race”. I say this because I do not see any young engineers at my company who were born in this country. These engineers were born and raised in India, China, Africa, Indonesia, etc… I’ve spoken with many of them who say their educational system is structured such that they did not waste time repeating the same concepts in middle school. This allows them to easily handle advanced concepts in HS.
I do not know reason as to why so many STEM students in this country do not succeed. I would think that a the top of the list is lack of preparation. So what in the world is wrong with exposing our kids who have the aptitude/ability to advanced math/science concepts?
I think you’re overestimating the difficulty of STEM majors in college. By a lot.
I took 3 AP courses (and tests) in high school, went to college in a STEM major, and graduated in a STEM major. Why would a student need to take 12+ AP courses in high school to be successful in college (STEM major or other major)?
Of course, the immigrants were the academic elite of their countries, having been filtered by their origin countries often-highly-competitive university admissions, then by admission to graduate programs in the US.
Also, if you are preferentially hiring engineers with graduate degrees, you will get an international-heavy cohort of hires. US citizen and permanent resident engineers will readily find jobs with their bachelor’s degrees most of the time, so graduate programs fill their spots with internationals. Since the graduate programs are funded, it is much less expensive for internationals to enter the US as graduate students than as undergraduates.
I completely disagree. I have several members of my family including my son have STEM degrees. Son recently graduated from Cornell with a CHEME degree. I fully understand the difficulty involved.
I could interpret your assertion two ways, Proud3894. Perhaps you believe that students who don’t have 12+ AP classes can’t possibly be prepared enough to get STEM degrees. But this is plainly untrue, since the vast majority of students who get STEM degrees didn’t have 12 APs. Even at the elitest schools, even among STEM majors, 12 AP students are in the minority.
Or you could believe that all those students getting STEM degrees could have taken 12 APs in high school and still have had a balanced healthy life, including sleep, but they chose not to or were not given the opportunity. But this is improbable: the students who do go to these rat race schools and compete in the AP rat race aren’t having balanced healthy lives. Why would the non-rat-race STEM students have been any healthier?
Exhibiting your son, who has a STEM degree and who (I presume) took a lot of APs, doesn’t tell us anything about whether the APs were necessary.
Also, once you get past the first several, the additional APs to get to 12+ are probably “AP lite” ones anyway. So a schedule with 12+ APs may not be more rigorous than a schedule with 6 of the more rigorous APs plus relatively rigorous academic electives that are similar in rigor to “AP lite” courses. That said, there may be some high schools where the most rigorous academic electives beyond the usual college prep core are the “AP lite” courses. Some of these courses actually are good to offer to high school students as academic electives, but the use of the AP branding on them sort of dilutes the meaning of AP.
Regarding a secret summer organic chemistry course - this sounds highly unlikely to be the whole story. With all due respect @TheGFG, I’m a parent and a teacher and it’s usually the case that a complaining parent claims that “everyone” does something when that is false. I understand that you don’t feel your district served your kids well. However, here are some thoughts:
- How do you know that "everyone" (or at least your racistly-designated cadre of "Asian" families) all took this secret summer course? The simple fact of many kids doing better than your daughter, even if she got into Stanford, is not really conspiracy evidence.
- How do you address @PickOne1 's question as to why Organic Chem would have stood in as a preparation for General Chem? I teach Honors Chemistry and am very familiar with the curricula of these courses. An Organic Chemistry class would definitely be "enrichment" and not specifically germane to nearly any of the contents of the AP curriculum.
- What was your daughter's response when AP Chem was too hard for her? Did she go for extra help? Read more in the book? Consider taking the next class down? To get a failing grade, as opposed to "not an A/B" takes some doing, even in AP Chem.
- In AP and advanced classes in general, it is absolutely an expectation that some content will be learned independently. This is for at least four reasons: 1) professionals always have to do some independent or partner/group work, and kids who want to grow up to be these professionals, need practice at all levels of education; 2) AP curriculum is incredibly condensed, and there is not class time to "chalk and talk" the entire thing, particularly with mandated labs; 3) kids who are appropriately placed in AP classes should be able to demonstrate independent learning, and those who cannot, should know quickly that it is time to switch classes; 4) foundational knowledge levels may vary widely and it is a waste of everyone's time to e.g. spend a class on calculating significant figures rather than have everyone be expected to demonstrate mastery by X date to be at the same place and move on to deeper material.
- This reminds me of your claim in a different thread that your daughter was taught math by an "incompetent" teacher and the proof of this was your friend with a PhD said so, and there was some "impossible" take-home test - but you never answered the question as to why your D was taking a take-home, and if this was an extra special accommodation in the first place.
A lot of the stories you tell about your district sound like complaints about other kids being too capable. You don’t seem to believe that for some kids, and some families, a really really high level of achievement, APs, etc., would be perfectly appropriate. I think we can all agree - some kids should not be jumping in to such a high level of APs and advancement, because it will make them very unhappy. Other kids (either by dint of innate ability or willingness to put in the hours) should not have their opportunities restricted in order to bring down the average achievement level.
In my Honors Science classes, there are always a small number of kids who are there because “colleges like to see success in Honors classes” - and uh oh- they’re not getting an A or even an A-. Suddenly the complaints begin. However, since there are many kids who are getting As, there’s not much of a leg to stand on, because the class is clearly doable for kids who belong there - and/or for kids who would be fine getting a B, for heaven’s sake. I actually don’t care why my own children’s classmates get an A, even if it’s because they secretly learned everything already. How would that hurt my child? It’s like tennis; having more learning/ability surrounding him will make him work harder, too.
That said, I wouldn’t actively pre-teach my own children before they went to class, because that would send a message to them that I don’t believe in them, which of course I do. My middle son is in a math track with a handful of kids who do pre-learn much of the material, and my son totally holds his own anyway. Once you get past introductory classes, “pre-learning”/cramming doesn’t really improve your performance in a well-taught course. It might improve your learning, though, if you can understand things more deeply.
There might also be a difference between a kid “pre-learning” because s/he loves to read about something, vs. because the kid is forced to be in some kind of boot camp.
I had one student who finally dropped Honors and went to a regular college-prep class because she had a B; she had made my life miserable with her and her mother’s complaints about there being clearly too much work. Well, too much to balance with her spending 10-15 hours per week getting extra tutoring, mostly in SATs to bring her scores up from around 1800 to “the 2100 that I need to get into an Ivy League school”. And too much to manage when she wasn’t really well placed in Honors to begin with. Someone needs to tell that kid that she should set her sights outside of the most elite colleges. Instead, that kid’s parallels in NJ are telling my advanced students’ counterparts that they need to settle for learning less because they’re moving too fast and making her feel like she’s not as capable. Newsflash - she is not as capable, and there’s a limit to how much money can be converted to academic success.
By the way, the loudest people are not always the majority. I have scores of students who do just fine in regular classes, maybe with a few Honors/APs along the way, and maybe not, with As and Bs or even the occasional C, and they go to college, too. They have different kinds of parents, though, i.e. those who recognize the need for every child to run his/her own race. My point is only that for some kids, acceleration is absolutely the right race to run.
@ucbalumnus, no, I don’t think it is or was typical to teach AP chemistry as a one semester class. Not done in my high school, or my kids’ school; never heard of this. There is a lot of material in AP chem–I think my daughter thought it was the hardest AP class, and I don’t see why or how it would be compressed to one semester (excepting high schools on a true college-style 4 course per semester block schedule). We did have BC taught over a year without a pre-requisite for AB in my school. The justification given by my kids’ school for requiring AB prior to BC is that our kids are taking 8 classes, many of them in 5+ AP classes, and so they teach calc as a two year sequence to lighten the workload. I’m not completely happy about it but I do think kids now are taking more AP classes, so there is something to this.
It was not a block schedule school. However, that one semester AP chemistry course was to be taken after regular high school chemistry, not in place of it. Since AP chemistry credit seems to be sometimes accepted in place of first semester general chemistry in college, it is not completely unreasonable for it to be a semester-long course in high school for students who have completed high school chemistry and are willing to take on that material at college pace. Admittedly, it seems to be less common these days for AP courses to cover material at college pace, and may not have been that common for chemistry even back then.
I just double checked the school I know which offers it, and it is indeed stated to be a course taken after general chemistry, where a student has passed with an A or B grade. This school states that many of the students who take this AP course, a lab course, are those most interested in going on to study and work in the field of sciences.
@ucbalumnus, yes, it is unreasonable.
College class: 3 hours lecture plus 1 hour section per week, plus 3 hour lab. 7 total instructional hours. Kids taking 3-4 other classes.
High school class: 3.75 hours instructional time per week. Kids taking 6-7 other classes.