http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/advanced-placement
Like my state’s flagship schools, Rutgers gives two semesters credit for a 5 on the AP Chem test so it appears that the course is covering one year of college chemistry in one year of high school. Whether STEM majors can (or should) accept this credit is a whole other thread, but it does not appear to be a watered down college chemistry class based on the few college sites I have checked.
Same here, getting schooled. And that’s for the one semester AP course.
For AP chemistry scores, http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/exam-credit/ap-credits/index.html indicates that out of the 9 UC campuses:
4 give no specific subject credit, except possibly general education categories or exemption from remedial chemistry without needing other placement testing.
1 gives no specific subject credit or subject credit for one semester of general chemistry, depending on one’s major.
3 give subject credit for the first quarter or semester of general chemistry.
1 gives subject credit for up to a year of general chemistry (with a 5 score), but recommends taking the honors general chemistry sequence if continuing on to more chemistry courses or for professional school preparation.
I have looked at that so many times trying to make sense of it. Finally tonight I think I’ve come closer.
Actually, I believe my two older kids were more capable than the majority of their peers because they succeeded without all the summer classes and tutoring. When they passed a placement exam to get into the regular advanced track (not the hyper one that entails AP in middle school), it was due to natural ability or using what they had learned in school or on their own. It was not because their parents made them attend school every summer from 8 AM to 3 PM Monday through Friday, and every Saturday morning during the school year. Don’t confuse naturally bright with intensively prepped. There are plenty of really bright Asians, but they’re not ALL these bored geniuses in need of challenge and 14 APs courses. They have been drilled and drilled and drilled since age 3. Really, when our school population is 65% non-Asian, but AP enrollment is only 7% non-Asian, what conclusion do you draw from that? Is it really the case that all those Caucasian/black/Hispanic/other kids are too lazy, unmotivated, or stupid for AP classes? Or is something else going on? Do we really think it’s a good idea for kids to spend that many hours of their young lives sitting behind a desk? Here in the US, we used to believe in children playing outside and teens hanging out reading or working summer jobs. I certainly fall way closer to tiger mom on the parenting spectrum than not, but it has gotten out of hand for all the kids. WWP is not the only district in the area to have parent protests, and it’s not just the allegedly lazy white people complaining. I posted a video on another thread about a district near WWP where it is the Indian parents complaining that their MIDDLE SCHOOL kids aren’t sleeping due to too much homework.
I really don’t care who believes me or not. I am not speaking out of sour grapes because my older kids did very well, grabbed that gold ring of elite school admission, and are excelling in their careers. But here in NJ, top students are sacrificing a lot just to be a little above average, and must sacrifice a tremendous amount to be in the top 5%. We were at a track meet today. In the meet program was an article about one of the top runners from our state who is currently attending a lottery school. She is AA, by the way. She reports having had to stay up to 1 or 2 am EVERY night in high school, and to my knowledge her school is not an affluent, pressure cooker school like WWP. This sort of experience is the norm here for our top kids and is what is now necessary to succeed. Just look at the monster that is now summer homework! There are a whole mess of issues rolled into one big problem: some poor teaching, some unnecessarily excessive workloads, and some truly super advanced material being taught (eg. in science classes) as a response to outside prep. A colleague of my H who is an Indian PhD has a son a year older than mine, and a D the same age as mine. He thought the level of the science classes was very high, and said he didn’t see the material they were studying until junior or senior year of college.
And it is also true that all the hours of work don’t necessarily yield a better education for our kids. High school D recently had to do her own translation of a Kafka piece from German to English for AP Lang. She has never studied German. Nor is she a Kafka scholar–obviously. She had to annotate it, justifying her word choices using Google translate and a German dictionary and grammar charts. Is this the kind of thing that really helps educate her, or is it time-consuming smoke and mirrors that sounds really scholarly but is inappropriate for her and therefore meaningless? These are the sort of assignments that keep them up at night. Sure she did it, just like her older sister still managed to pass AP Chem and get a 4 on the AP exam. But succeeding required more blood, sweat and tears than was healthy.
“High school D recently had to do her own translation of a Kafka piece from German to English for AP Lang. She has never studied German.” That is absolutely crazy. I would bring that assignment into the principal’s office and ask why a kid who isn’t a German student, is being required, in an English class, to translate German?
This district is near WWP.
@Proud3894 wrote:
This is not correct. Students in Asia (where I came from) don’t take many college-level classes in highschool. Their STEM curricula are spread from middle school to high school (instead of being compacted in HS). Their curricular also emphasize the deep understanding of middle school and high school subjects, not college subjects. For example, students learn geometry from 7th grade to 12th grade and solve proof problems requiring deep thinking. We don’t see this in US high schools.
“A colleague of my H who is an Indian PhD has a son a year older than mine, and a D the same age as mine. He thought the level of the science classes was very high, and said he didn’t see the material they were studying until junior or senior year of college.”
When my father, who is a college professor, told me that my HS/MS sons were reading/doing math independently that he didn’t see until graduate school, I was thrilled and he was wistful. That’s the essential difference here. Some kids and some families really value soaking up as much learning as possible, because of its inherent value. Please don’t hold everyone else back because your kids are “stressed”. If it takes too much effort for someone’s children to be “in the top 5%” then they do have the option of settling for the bottom 95%.
As for the Kafka translation assignment, I find the story unlikely as told. Is it possible that there was a short passage with certain relevant grammatical constructions being studied, because English is a Germanic language? Districts that attract the kinds of parents you’re describing, would normally hear a lot of fuss if there were actually an inappropriate assignment.
Do those who are OK with students taking 12 or more APs think it is OK for those students to also spend all summer in summer school taking a HS course and then taking that same course for credit at the high school? Is there nothing wrong with kids going to evening or Saturday school when they are already in class from 7:30 am to 3 pm and have hours of homework every night? Is there any point at which you might say "enough? There has to be a tipping point.
Our district does not allow freshman to take APs and limits the ones sophomores can take to AP Euro, and for kids in the advanced track, AP Bio and possibly a few other exceptions for an individual case. Even the honors classes are limited in freshman year. After that, the top students take pretty much all honors or APs. We have good college placement, better than a neighboring district that starts the top kids in AP World as freshman. Students from our HS universally say they are well prepared for college, many saying it is easier than high school was. There is a lot of private tutoring for some classes (physics in particular), but no summer classes are offered (beyond remedial). Some kids may take a college class in the summer through CTY or at a college, but it is rare. The top kids are stressed out and work very hard, but there is seems to be something of a balance.
A district can limit the number of APs and offer other challenging course without limiting the ability of those kids to get admitted to a top college. The colleges want to see that the student has taken the most challenging curriculum offered and done very well, and if the HS limits the APs offered, the college will know that. And, by the way, even with fewer APs and less “cramming” our high school outranks both of the WWP HSs in the State rankings.
This is beyond stupid. Google translate doesn’t capture any of the context behind the original German, unlike a professional translator with the academic training to understand Kafka’s writing. What a waste of time and effort (that should be spent on English Lang!). 
@mom2and - I wouldn’t presume to tell someone else or their kid what to do with a summer or how many classes to take. I can answer for my own kids, and my own district, however:
My kids have never done summer school; they go to a very active camp, on the thought that it’s more important to move out of the bottom 10% in athletics, as opposed to into the top 1% in academics. For the last two summers, my DS16 has worked - volunteering and not related to his studies the first summer, and working in a research lab this past summer.
My kids take a couple of Art of Problem Solving online math classes every year, purely out of interest. In fact, the first time my oldest wanted to do so, we had him put some of his own money into the tuition to make sure he really wanted to do it, because I thought it might be a gimmick.
But actually it’s a great set of classes. My children have not taken the “normal school sequence” math classes there, but have taken the enrichment classes. I notice that AoPS now has slower versions of some of their classes, no doubt to cater to kids whose parents misinterpret success of AoPS-takers as resulting from AoPS itself.
To directly answer your question - no there is not “any point at which (I) might say ‘enough’” to someone ELSE’s kid’s choices. Studies show that summers are times that a lot of students lose academic ground - granted, these are studies of kids at the bottom end of the achievement spectrum, but I don’t see why high-achieving kids wouldn’t also forget material over a long break unless they keep up with it.
What’s anyone’s problem with what other people’s kids are doing? I sense the reluctance to cede unearned privilege. “Wait, slow down; I don’t want to move quickly but I still want to win.”
Would anyone think they could tell another family not to spend as much time/effort/money on sports? I think the families who spend hours and hours every week on a sports team, plus camps in the summer, etc. are making a choice that I would never make, that I think is misplaced priorities. More importantly, I know that even if I spent just as much time/effort/money on sports for my children, they would get a little better, but would never be in the top 5-10% of HS athletes. I encourage my kids to swim/run/elliptical on a regular basis, and am ok with that.
It would be ridiculous for me to make my kids spend every waking hour on a sport, and then whine that my kid “needed” to do that and that life must be unfair because my kid still wasn’t winning as much as the kid nearby with actual talent. And insist that the coach was giving “unfair assignments” when my kid wasn’t able to keep up. Or whine that a group of different-race families were more effective at extra sports all the time and so they were taking all the spots on the team.
The fundamental difference in the USA is that we have a national aspiration to equality that some misinterpret as everyone being equally smart and equally likely to be in the top N % academically. But just like athletic and musical talent, academic talent is not spread equally among everyone. It’s also true, but NOT as much as many believe, that academic talent can lead to more economic opportunity than other kinds of talent. Maybe here @pizzagirl can chime in and assure us that no one really cares if you were in the top 3% or went to HYP once you’re out and working, and your social skills matter much more.
In my district, APs are limited by their prerequisites, not age. The middle school is not compatible with the high school in terms of cross-registration, which has its pros and cons. Most advanced 9th graders take three Honors, and no APs, though some do take AP Computer Science or AP Music Theory or other things they are ready for.
My DS16 will have taken 11 APs by the end of his HS time, 12 if you count Physics as two which I think it does count officially. I would say he rarely has excessive homework and does not seem stressed out, except for a few weeks when he was learning how to learn in AP World and AP Latin simultaneously in tenth grade. And the semester he thought it might be fun to add a local college course to the mix in addition to his seven other classes. So by the way, he cancelled the college course and life went on - I wouldn’t have wanted someone else telling him he couldn’t even try!
Sometimes he is up as late as 11pm, and I worry because I know the science says that teens need 9+ hours of sleep per night to really succeed with maximum brain power. But he catches up on weekends, and makes sure to go to bed early on nights before tests/contests.
As a teacher, I also see kids spending a lot of time on FaceBook and/or on extensive grooming (blowing out long hair daily, complicated manicures/makeup, etc.) and other things that can absorb a surprising amount of time. I have one kid in particular in a lower-level course, who never completes her homework but she always looks like she walked out of a magazine. I wish just once she’d grab sweats and a ponytail and finish the lab!
My older S will have 10 APs by the time he graduates and my younger S will have 15. They are active in extra curriculars and have many friends. They are not stressed except in the height of the season for their ECs. My kids go to bed at 10:30 every night even after being in practice until 7. We don’t have these cram schools in our areas-outside of Kumon. Advanced classes are not offered in summer school. We have situations where some kids quit their ECs to pursue more APs but it is very rare. We do have some excessive summer pre-work for AP World in my opinion. According to my kids, the kids who complain the most about homework are not making the most of class time and are spending half the night on social media complaining about homework.
I don’t know what we are doing differently here but limiting APs is not necessary to achieve balance.
@Cardinal Fang
My point still stands that if you cannot handle taking 12 or more AP classes in high school that a student cannot handle a more rigorous STEM program in college. Nowhere in my post have I indicated that any engineering program requires 12 AP classes. When I graduated HS, I took zero AP classes. Most of my EE classmates also took very few AP classes. That was thirty years ago. People seem to think that competition in college has remained stagnant. When your grades are curved based on your classmates competency, you are at a disadvantage in today’s climate.
What you are basically saying is that all engineering students in a rigorous program cannot have a balanced and healthy lifestyle. It is a though all engineers are undergoing psychotherapy. What I am saying is that with proper guidance you can achieve balance.
I am absolutely confident that all of my son’s AP classes taken in high school had a direct bearing on his success. If we had a redo, we would have had him take one additional AP class based his struggles in his CS classes.
I am done with this thread.
I have been following this thread and have posted occasionally. What I’m taking from it at this point is that our high schools vary tremendously. My children attended private high schools, at least in part because I did not want them immersed in the rat race of our local ultra-high achieving public high school. I am chuckling a little bit at the racial divide in the article because in my case it was Asian parents who warned me about the crippling pressure of the public school.
I take it on faith that those of you whose children have sought out 12+ AP classes are happy with the arrangement because it came closest to allowing your children to learn what they wanted. Friends have told me that the only options in their districts were AP or mind-numbing regular classes with peers who didn’t want to be there at all. I respect that parents do the best they can to guide their children forward.
I guess my continuing issue with all of this is that I’m having a problem equating AP classes and sleepless nights with intelligence or intellectual curiosity. For one thing, as I and others have already said, it doesn’t follow that the brilliant, gifted kids who supposedly soar through school without challenge have to take summer classes in order to take the same class the following year. It doesn’t follow that these kids need to be drilled, drilled, drilled from an early age in order to perform at the top. My eldest daughter’s peers took summer classes for two reasons: to boost the resume and/or to cement the A in the same class to be taken the following year. It was all training to jump for that brass ring and as more and more kids joined the game, the stakes became higher and the competition more and more frenzied. It went from simply taking summer classes when my eldest was in high school to private tutoring, establishing a foundation, and conducting scientific research to further the aims of the aforementioned foundation, when my youngest was in high school 7 years later. Writing wasn’t enough any longer. Now to claim that he or she was a talented writer, the kid had to have a novel published or create an online literary magazine with actual subscribers.
So I don’t really care if the AP classes are extended, left as is, or limited. What really matters is allowing the kids who truly want to pursue their academic interests to do so without creating the unhealthy environment I see around me. I don’t know how we get there but as a school district, as a first step, I’d eliminate the ability to enroll in the AP class if the child had taken a summer class in the same subject.
@3girls3cats - I think most people agree that really smart kids should be able to learn as fast as they want.
The objection is, among the rest of the parents - is it reasonable for some kids to substitute time (and frankly, money) for brilliance and also try to squeeze into those advanced courses and mimic the achievement records such as by getting a high grade after pre-learning everything they can over the summer…?
Since we value hard work and independent choices in USAmerican culture, I would say that no family should attempt to limit another family’s efforts in this vein. I have a big problem with opt-out-ers trying to make sure no other family makes a different choice.
But my biggest objection of all is to parents who complain that life is unfair/impossible because even with all the money and time they’re spending, their kid isn’t making it to as high a “percentile” as they thought would be possible.
They see examples of brilliant kids who “do it all” and get enough sleep, and they see examples of hard workers (often stereotyped as immigrants or “Asians”) who spend inordinate amounts of time and effort and also do great. Somehow the perception is that because their kid isn’t making it to the imaginary elite with those other kids, that life needs to be adjusted for everyone else.
At the risk of repeating myself, if it’s too hard to “get to the top 5%” then settle for the lower 95%. Our school doesn’t even rank, so I find the percentiles to be a bit weird. (It should, by definition, be hard to be the best, right?)
And with holistic elite college admissions, remember that LoR and essays are extremely important too. Those are much harder to fake.
When I went to high school, most of the relatively few AP courses available were the senior level of the honors versions in various subjects like English, math, and foreign languages. Obviously, calculus BC could be taken earlier by a super-advanced math student, and the foreign language ones could be taken earlier by a student who is advanced in the language for some reason (e.g. heritage speaker). The chemistry one was to be taken after regular chemistry, which was normally taken in 11th or 10th grade. So, even though there was no policy limiting AP courses in 9th grade, it was presumably very rare (maybe a math super-prodigy taking calculus BC, or a heritage speaker taking Spanish or French).
Of course, now there are “AP lite” courses like human geography that seem appropriate as an honors course suitable for 9th graders, but the (lack of) subject credit that colleges offer for those AP scores shows that they are not really on the level of English literature, calculus BC, etc.
@fretfulmother, I read it differently than you do. I think there are very different takes on what and how kids should learn in high school. From my perspective, the people posting along the lines I am are absolutely not demanding that their children be allowed to move into the top 5%. Some of us don’t even know what percentile our children have fallen into because our schools don’t rank. What we are looking at with some horror is an environment that is not necessarily more academically rich but which has prompted many children to take their own lives, which has left children prone to eating disorders, depression, and anxiety.
I also believe that there is a line at which we do get to make decisions for all. It’s the line at which the pre-learning and drilling crosses over from enrichment into academic dishonesty.
@3girls3cats - thank you for that explanation. Do we have concrete evidence that teen suicide is higher in districts where more AP exams are offered? Do we know which cadre of kids are experiencing mental health problems, and what their parents are asking of them?
I think I understand your point that you believe excessive pre-learning is cheating, but I do not agree. I do think that it is a way for previously-unprivileged groups to push their kids ahead. Is it cheating for a parent to hire a tutor or to use legacy status to get a kid into college? Maybe.
Also, every one of us on CC does some pre-teaching in the sense of using sophisticated vocabulary and buying books and talking about the importance of education, for our children. Is that cheating? Possibly. It certainly makes the playing field uneven.
The colleges that have seen a rise in admission selectivity have also seen substantial grade inflation; see http://www.gradeinflation.com . And college has gotten easier, as evidenced by the study on the declining time cost of college. That may be in part due to technological advancements. No longer does one have to go to the library and dig through the card catalog and look through a bunch of books to find the references you need, when the web will tell you exactly what books to go get from the library (or from web/mail order if the library does not have it). Of course, when you are doing your CS programming assignments, the cheap computer in your dorm room has many orders of magnitude more computing power than the computer shared by a CS class a few decades ago.
Also, the marginal APs going from about 6 to 12 are probably “AP lite” ones that probably do not add to the overall course rigor of one’s schedule, if there are merely taken in substitution of academic electives that may have been offered in high schools before those “AP lite” ones were offered.