AP Courses Get a Much-Needed Checkup
Last week I wrote an article that explained an innovative program to give merit pay to students who take and pass Advanced Placement exams. This week’s issue isn’t the tests, it’s the curricula.
In “To Be Advanced Placement, Courses Must Pass Muster,” Daniel De Vise of the Washington Post reports on the College Board’s decision to audit the syllabi of 130,000 AP teachers to judge whether their classes are worthy of the AP distinction [read it through the Bradenton Herald]:
An explosion in AP study - participation in the program has nearly doubled this decade - has bred worry, particularly among college leaders, of a decline in the rigor for which the courses are known. Once the exclusive province of elite students at select high schools, AP study or its equivalent is now more or less expected of any student who aspires to attend even a marginally selective college.
In the haste to remain competitive in the AP arms race, schools sometimes award the designation to courses that barely resemble the college curriculum the program is meant to deliver, according to College Board officials and educators. Until now, there has been no large-scale effort to weed out such abuse.
As I wrote last week, an Advanced Placement course is designed to deliver college-level material to students who have the ability to handle it. This means teachers must have the knowledge and ability to teach it, which isn’t always the case. Reviewing syllabi is the College Board’s first line of defense in identifying and eliminating this problem.
Until now, the AP has only encouraged compliance with the few standards it’s set out for curriculum. Teachers are, of course, whining, especially the ones who haven’t ever prepared a real syllabus for their course:
The task has been met with no small amount of grumbling. But many faculty begrudgingly accept that some quality control is needed, lest the AP program spiral out of control.
Too late. Most of our AP darlings are woefully unprepared for college work (I won’t digress; if you think I’m wrong, just call up a professor at your local competitive-admissions college and ask). That means those AP courses with which they saturated their high school schedules just aren’t the same as a standard college class. Remember that taking an AP class is very different than taking an AP class and passing the test.
The teachers who churn out 4′s and 5′s from the majority of their students won’t have any trouble with this process. They’ve got syllabi and those syllabi (and methods) are adequate. That’s why their kids are getting excellent scores. The teachers who generate a class full of 1′s and no-shows are starting to sweat. They either have to gird their loins and start being real AP teachers or they’ll have to explain to students, colleagues and administrators why they aren’t teaching AP next year. The only two explanations are “My syllabus was rejected” or “I never submitted one.” I wouldn’t want to admit either.
This effort, while deserving praise, can only accomplish so much. Syllabi aren’t hard to write - even for the flaky, inadequate teacher. There is nothing stopping a teacher from spending a weekend on creating the syllabus without any intention of following it through for the 40 weeks of the following year. There are plenty of examples of excellent syllabi online, too. If the College Board cross-checks submissions with MIT’s OpenCourseWare site [that I wrote about here] for one, I’m sure they’ll spot a few opportunists. That’s where I’d go to cheat.
This is the equivalent of the written portion of that Driver’s License test you took when you were 16. You go through the motions, but it’s not much more than a hassle. And even though you put the right answer down for that question about the speed limit, you may or may not follow it in a few weeks.
The real measure of quality isn’t in the syllabus, it’s in the results. If your students average a 1.5 on the exam, you’re not teaching an AP course [or your kids can't handle it, which means you and the guidance counselors are at fault for letting them in]. If the College Board wants to judge the effectiveness of every AP course, they wil limplement a comprehensive system that includes the following:
- Having a designated representative in each District evaluate AP teachers periodically;
- Continuing to review teaching material/syllabi;
- Evaluating students’ grades on the AP exam for that class;
- Requiring professional development in the subject areas in which a teacher offers an AP course.
The first real step in AP quality control will be when the College Board denies use of the name “Advanced Placement” to any school who doesn’t require all students in AP courses to take the corresponding test in May.
UPDATE at 4/4/07, at 8.50am:
Jeffrey Solochek of the St. Petersburg Times has written a solid article on this topic that includes some reactions from teachers and administrators. Be sure to check out his blog: The Gradebook: Your Daily Report on Education News.
I teach AP Calculus. My school does not let anyone take the course unless they get a minimum grade of 88 in precalculus honor or 90 in precaluclus non-honor. To take BC, you must comprete honor pre calculus and get a 95. Everyone is required to take the exam and we usually have 90% passing with an average grade close to 4.
This is not true in other subjects. Kids are so desperately needed to fill physics classes, taht anyone who wants the class gets to take it. Every student is the school must take English and history, so everyone who wants to take an AP course in these subjects can take them. The schools have the AP status and it doesn’t hurt their budgets at all.
I agree 100% with your requirements for AP status.
I spoke with one auditor who confirmed the unspoken reason for the audit: College Board is trying to cut down on the schools who are using the AP name to get AP money without any intention on actually teaching the college-level course.
This auditor also reminded us that it would not be in the economic interest of the College Board to reject syllabi en masse.
Still, it’s a step in the right direction. And although I agree with you in terms of increasing accountability, what do you think of adding a component that compares a student’s test score with the class grade? The problem is when a student manages an A in the class and can’t earn a 5, or even a 4.
Not every student who takes an AP course does so with the goal of getting college credit. I understand that seems to defeat the purpose of taking an AP class, but I was thrilled to have C/D students step up to the plate and try some college level material before they left high school. They were still trying to see themselves as college students.
I don’t think that requiring all kids to take the test will say anything about the rigor of the class. As a Reader, I saw hundreds of test booklets each year that kids either left blank or wrote a lot of junk in—complaining how they were forced to take the test. I’m sure that the average score for their teachers suffered, but that doesn’t really give an accurate picture of how they ran their class or their qualifications to teach it. Meanwhile, there’s a cost involved in taking the tests. Kids on free/reduced lunch do get a break, but many other low income families do not. We shouldn’t force them to choose between an AP test and family groceries for a week.