CRACKS STARTING TO SHOW IN SCHOOLS' AP PROGRAMS

Date: Saturday, December 4, 2004

Participation in advanced placement exams is exploding. That would be good if it meant more students were tackling challenging, college-level material. It would be bad if it meant AP courses were being dumbed down to accommodate students who couldn't handle challenging college-level material. Ah, but which?

Here's a nod to the good side, as reported by education columnist Jay Mathews of The Washington Post. In a Nov. 23 column, brought to my attention by blogger Joanne Jacobs, he cites figures about college-completion rates in Texas from a book titled Do What Works: How Proven Practices Can Improve America's Public Schools, by Tom Luce and Lee Thompson. For students who took and passed an AP exam, 57 percent earned a bachelor's degree within five years. For students who took an AP exam but failed it, the college graduation rate was 37 percent. For students who never took an AP exam, the college graduation rate was 17 percent.

I am less impressed than Mathews appears to be by this; it is very likely that the students who got as far as taking an AP exam, even if they failed it, are different in academically significant ways from the students who never tried. No doubt it's true that a student who spends his high school years taking the most difficult courses he can handle and working hard at them will do better in college than that same student would if he took a bare minimum of the easiest courses he could and ditched one or two days a week besides. I just don't know how to distinguish the effects of motivation and ability.

Still, learning diligence is a Good Thing, and I agree with Mathews that students who want to tackle AP courses shouldn't be excluded from them.

Still, there is a question: What happens to AP courses if large numbers of students enroll for whom the courses are impossibly difficult?

In an article for the Fall 2003 issue of the journal Academic Questions, William Casement titles the result, "Declining Credibility for the AP Program."

The College Entrance Examination Board, which administers the AP program, says that a score of 3, on a scale of 1 through 5, is the equivalent of a C in a comparable college course, and thus deserving of college credit. But, Casement notes, colleges are less and less likely to agree.

He cites a study that found most elite colleges require at least a 4, some a 5 and some don't give course credit at all. That decision is typically made by departments, so different exams are refused credit at different institutions, but some universities have strict rules overall.

For example, he says that Stanford planned to refuse credit for 16 of 24 recognized AP courses starting in 2004-2005.

The problem is not just that students who take and pass an AP course don't get college credit for it. Casement notes that a Harvard study found that students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard.

Nearly a third of students who take AP courses do not even take the AP exams. "With a third of the students in the program performing such that they are not ready at the end to attempt the final exams, we must suspect that many AP teachers will feel pressure to compromise their standards."

Casement reasonably asks whether they will be willing to fail students who don't take the final, as would happen in a college course.

Also, many students who take AP courses are sophomores or juniors who have skipped the corresponding high school courses. It's fair to doubt whether they really can do college-level work "in a subject where their highest level of preparation is middle school."

Casement also points out that a majority of the people who grade AP exams are high-school teachers. Of course they've been college students, so they know what college work is like, but they may not be at all familiar with the expectations of colleges more selective than the ones they attended. "To what extent are they truly college-professor equivalents and to what extent are they merely the next best labor pool a mass employer can find?"

And who's teaching these courses? According to a College Board survey, some 100,000 high school teachers were teaching AP classes in 2000, and about half of them had master's degrees in a field consistent with the AP subject they were teaching.

"At what colleges would a faculty profile like this be considered acceptable -- roughly half the faculty lacking a master's degree in what they teach?" It would be borderline even for a community college, Casement says. Most colleges would not hire the people who are teaching courses for which they are awarding credit.

He is not saying, nor am I, that AP is a bad program. But some rethinking about what it is really for definitely is in order.