Former college prof and AP teacher: Advanced Placement is “one of the great frauds” in high school today

@anonymous I will not engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man who has to resort to name calling.

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To Just Saying…
You wrote one of the best things I’ve ever read on this blog.
THANKS.
So nice to see someone use logic.

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I have an idea. If you are qualified and eager to take a college course, why don’t you go to college? Why do we keep our bright students captive in high school programs? The author is correct – we are taking resources away from the rest of the high school population.

And please stop substituting “hard courses” for “educationally enriching”. I completely agree that “AP courses are a scourge … where intellectual curiosity goes to die,” Any course can be made harder – but for it to be relevant – that is a bigger challenge.

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@ Dunwoody Mom w/one child – Although the AP exams are not required, the teachers strongly recommend all students to take them. And we public school parents have to pay for AP exams too (unless students get some type of subsidy). But you are correct about the more competitive colleges not awarding credit for all AP courses taken. In fact, most will only accept up to three. CollegeBoard website offers some info on what AP credits colleges accept: http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.jsp

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@ATLborn& raised: very cool!

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@ HS pubic teacher

the stupidist thing I’ve seen in some time is the ignorance in your post.

assuming you are what you claim, a teacher, then you should know the quality of instruction of any course is based on (primarily) two things. the quality of the individual faculty member and the willingness of the student to work.

the USG sets the standards systemwide, so assuming the teaching quality is the same, the education a student gets in any specific class is just the same school to school to school.

if you wish to examine the quality of teaching, GPC is gonna hold its own against Tech 9 times out of 10 since GPC classes aren’t taught by TAs or by some reluctant researcher who is in there out of necessity/force.

same for UGA and Georgia College.

in this area at very least, you need to return to school, as you are sorely in need of educating

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It is too easy to hurl unfounded complaints toward schools and just about everyone has a complaint of some kind. AP programs provide high school students access to more rigorous content and there is no doubt that this program has a positive impact for Georgia’s students. (Note the announcements regarding 13th in the nation for AP results and 2nd in the nation for black students’ results.)

The writers of these essays seem to be driven by their small frame of reference rather than the larger picture of the massive numbers of students having access to advanced curriculum. To use the headline of “fraud” is problematic, too, because it suggests subversive actions. There are none. Teachers work diligently to provide the advanced curriculum to the students in their charge, and by the results seen here in Georgia, many of them are doing quite well.

If these writers are truly in the academic arena, they should attempt to provide more evidence of the claims they make.

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I’ve skimmed through but not read all the comments. AP is not equal at all schools. Colleges use the number of APs taken for admission — not necessarily for credit — the number of APs offered by the HS can be (and will be) used against the child.. the college will judge a transcript against what is offered at the school– so if the school offers 30 AP classes (even if they are poorly taught and packed at 40 kids a class) — the kid wanting to attend a “high end” college is expected to “max out” and do well on AP classes — regardless of whether it is a “good” experience in that HS (e.g. if the teacher is or is not following national curriculum as was happening with my eldest in a 40 kids AP class at his public HS) — AP isn’t the same everywhere. Some HSs have “gateways” and kids are not allowed into the classes without certain recommendations or scores on a particular test (e.g. 10th grade PSAT) — parents may be caught off guard if they don’t know this is going on. Certain colleges are then off limits if the HS offers the APs but the APs isn’t available because of the gateway requirements… Other HSs have an “anybody” in policy but the kids aren’t ready and can’t get out and their grades really suffer (colleges want the kids to do the best they can in the most rigorous course possible….– ideally As in APs but a C in AP may hurt Hope chances….). Also, too many APs and the kid may hit college at too high a level and have problems registering for courses or placing into classes that are too high — the classes may not be the same and they may really be unprepared for French 312 or Calc 3 because their teacher wasn’t as good as Dr. Stinson. It’s not necessarily the same. It depends on the college — e.g. a school like Pomona may want to see 9 APs for admission but will only give a kid credit for 2.

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I agree with the gripes of some posters about the TAs. Unfortunately, many of them do not speak English well enough to be effective teachers. Seeing as we are paying for our children to be taught, it seems that we are getting gypped by the USGA.

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Ascribing this definition to ALL Advanced Placement courses is the mark of someone who feels threatened and/or inadequate in his/her craft. Most people who have taken an AP course in multiple areas will tell us that many times the subject matter dictates whether it is a “forced march” where “intellectual curiosity goes to die.” History happened in a certain order; math and science are based on facts that often build on one another. Psychology and Language and Literature and Foreign Language and Art and Music are entirely different. One must spark intellectual curiosity in these courses. There is more than one way to write an essay; there is more than one way to interpret a poem or a piece of music; there is more than one way to communicate ideas in another language. The conversations of these intellectually curious students in the AP classrooms are what make them worthy of taking.
Perhaps opponents should look at the entire picture rather than lumping every AP course into the dustbin.
I have students who made a 5 on the English Language and Composition exam as juniors and then decide to opt for the dual enrollment path in their senior year. The University of Alabama and Georgia Tech and the University of Alabama all gave those students full or partial credit for their comp courses, but Georgia Perimeter does not. What are those students doing in comp at Georgia perimeter? Many of them are learning basic grammar, diagramming sentences, are re-learning formulaic writing. They walk into the entry level course and feel as though they’ve entered the Twilight Zone. What do we do in my classroom? We read, we discuss, and we write. We learn basic moves of rhetoric and how to see the answer (or non-answer) that is often hidden. We challenge ideas and we back our arguments with facts. We ditch formulas and write to express ourselves in an academically mature but stylistically interesting fashion. No wonder why going back to basic grammar is a slap in the face to my former students.
I feel the sting of that slap when I read what others (who probably never taught multiple AP disciplines) trash all AP courses based on their own limited experiences. Shame on you.

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You make some good points and, in general, I agree with you. My only comment is that I think “Guidance” Counselors should also stop making similar generalizations in favor of AP to the detriment of all other options.

My son’s guidance counselor emphatically stated she does not support dual enrollment as any AP course my son would take in HS would be more “rigorous” (I really hate that word) than anything he’d get in college. Poppycock. Much depends upon the teacher/professor and HS/college/university. My son goes to a well-respected HS, but his current AP Computer Science class pales in comparison to the same subject matter class being taught at GT. How do I know? I actually know the professor who teaches that class and said that what my son has covered in 4 weeks in his AP class, the GT class went through in 1.5 weeks. He also noted some deficiency in the AP CS curriculum. I am not stating this to malign his HS or teacher, but to merely point out that a motivated student should be allowed to “move on when ready.” Or did Deal lie again?

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@ AP Teacher

I don’t quite understand your point. The AP course you describe yourself as teaching sounds like a good secondary course, the kind of course that students would all do well to take before going off to a university to be taught by professors. Instead of posturing as some sort of college-level teacher, almost a professor, you should take credit for being a strong high school teacher.

My question is, wouldn’t your skills at teaching a good high school course be better applied in a high school course?

I’m puzzled as to why students who have such good secondary preparation as yours would go to Georgia Perimeter. People I know who have worked in such institutions refer to them as “Grade Thirteen.” It seems that your students are prepared for higher instruction, so why Perimeter?

I agree with the original author. Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule, but high school teachers should teach high school classes. The place to take college courses is college, not your local high school. AP courses taught by high school teachers are not college courses.

Of course, in our world of dumbing down and grade inflation, one can easily understand the source of the idea that AP courses are “just like college, only cheaper.” Every student is so above average now that no one even has to go to college to enter higher education. Right.

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The Advanced Placement Program® invites AP® teachers and students to examine multiple sides of an issue — thinking critically, examining evidence, and then arguing with precision and accuracy — and this invitation extends to their views of the AP Program itself. Accordingly, AP evolves from year to year, thanks in no small part to insightful and incisive feedback from educators and youth.

So when I read a recent blog post by John Tierney, I was disappointed that he hadn’t demonstrated the same critical thinking skills we see so effectively deployed by AP students, who recognize that hyperbole and overstatement should be used sparingly, that intellectually honest arguments must be grounded in evidence, and that complex issues require careful thinking.

On behalf of the tens of thousands of AP teachers and students whose classroom experiences Mr. Tierney so unilaterally condemns, I’m writing to provide some evidence intended to describe a much more diverse set of AP experiences than Mr. Tierney allows.

Mr. Tierney says AP courses don’t “hold a candle” to the college course he taught. I have no data about the quality of the course he taught, so can only compare AP courses to the introductory college courses at institutions like Duke, Stanford, University of California–Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, and Yale, which are among dozens of institutions that each recently piloted AP Exam questions among its own students to confirm comparability of content, skills and rigor. In fact, 5,000 college professors from the nation’s leading colleges and universities participate annually in the review of every AP teacher’s course, the writing of each AP Exam question, and the scoring of the AP Exams. These professors consistently attest to the overall quality of AP teachers’ work and its comparability to the best outcomes of introductory college courses. These professors recognize that just as there is much variability among the thousands of instructors who teach introductory courses on college campuses, there is variability among AP teachers. And these professors express a wish that there were as much support for quality across the instructors of introductory college courses, many of whom are graduate students teaching their first courses, as there is for AP teachers, let alone a consistent external examination to serve as a reliable and valid measure of learning in such coursework.

After castigating AP teachers, Mr. Tierney condemns AP students as well, claiming that “two thirds” of his own AP students did not belong in his course and “dragged down the course” for students who did “belong there.” Again, I will not claim visibility into his own experience with his own students, but I can say that nationally, there has been a great victory among educators who have believed that a more diverse population could indeed succeed in AP courses. In 2012, AP scores were higher than they’d been since 2004, when one million fewer students were being given access. These outcomes are a powerful testament to educators’ belief that many more students were indeed ready and waiting for the sort of rigor that would prepare them for what they would encounter in college.

Despite educators having doubled the number of underrepresented minority students participating in AP over the past decade, we do share Mr. Tierney’s concern that “large percentages of minority students are essentially left out.” Our data show that among African American, Hispanic and Native American students with a high degree of readiness for AP, only about half of these students are participating, often because their schools do not yet offer the AP course. We call for continued commitment to expanding the availability of AP courses among prepared and motivated students of all backgrounds.

This is not at all the same as claiming that all students, here and now, should be enrolled in AP courses. These are, indeed, college-level courses. The data show this irrefutably. But just as all American students are not yet prepared for college, all American students are not yet prepared for AP course work. We must be vigilant about fostering greater readiness for AP, and then we must care for students within AP courses by providing support, mentorship and encouragement.
This also includes investments in addressing the balance of the breadth and depth required by AP courses. We engage professors and teachers regularly in the review of AP course content, and we find that in most AP subjects, AP teachers and students have significant flexibility to tailor the AP requirements to topics and issues of deep personal interest, while developing a rich understanding of the key concepts and skills in each discipline. But in science and history, two subject areas that, by their very nature, expand the amount of possible content with every passing day and new discovery, we have recognized a need to implement a significant redesign effort that frees teachers and students from the pressure to cover superficially all possible topics. This redesign has been embraced by higher and secondary education alike as the new “gold standard” in introductory college science and history curricula.

Finally, Mr. Tierney’s financial claims are inaccurate. Contrary to Mr. Tierney’s statement, schools do not pay to offer AP courses. Instead, the not-for-profit College Board incurs the costs to register a school to offer AP courses and to authorize each locally developed AP syllabus, and we subsidize teacher professional development for schools unable to afford to send a teacher to one of the dozens of U.S. universities that train new AP teachers each summer. The AP Exams themselves are optional (80 percent of students opt to take them), and we cover all of our operating costs (developing, printing, shipping, scoring the exams) with the $89 exam fee, which is less than the cost of a typical college textbook, let alone the credit hours for that college course. For students unable to afford the $89 fee, the College Board partners with federal and state and local agencies to reduce the fee (historically to $0–5 per exam). After paying for our expenses with the exam fees, decisions about the use of any remaining funds are decided by our Board of Trustees, which is composed of educators from colleges, universities and secondary schools. Unlike a for-profit entity, where profits privately benefit investors, the College Board is obligated to reinvest remaining funds in educational programs, specifically because it is a not-for-profit organization. The College Board Trustees ensure these funds are used to improve educational opportunity and quality for a diversity of students. This year, they have approved the use of such funds to provide, for example, scholarships to teachers; increased subsidies to low-income students; creation of online score reports for AP students; and online learning supports for students.

The AP Program is not a silver bullet. It is not a simple cure for all challenges we face within our education systems. But as educators use AP standards to help a diversity of students engage in rigorous work worth doing, I find myself inspired daily by what they are achieving.

Trevor Packer
Senior Vice President, Advanced Placement and SpringBoard Programs
The College Board

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[...] this month, I linked to a controversial essay in the Atlantic by a former college professor and high school teacher criticizing Advanced Placement [...]

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