Re-Evaluating

AP Courses

BY FRANK DiMARIA

From The Hispanic Outlook

in Higher Education

On the surface, high school Advanced Placement (AP) courses might seem to be a no-brainer for those high-per-forming high school students searching for a challenging aca-demic environment and a fulfill-ing experience while earning college credits at a fraction of the cost of what they would pay when enrolled in college. The AP program, which is admin-istered by the College Board, offers more than 30 courses and corresponding exams across multiple subject areas that are modeled on comparable college courses and align with college-level standards.

A challenging academic en-vironment, college courses for a fraction of the cost, academic fulfillment? It almost sounds

too good to be true. Well, to some, it is.

Many independent research-ers—those not affiliated with the College Board—have been critical of AP courses over the years. John Tierney is one of those critics, but with a unique perspective. As a former col-lege professor and high school teacher, Tierney is one of only a few individuals in the country who's been involved in AP at both the college and high school level. As a professor at Boston College, he sat on a committee that designed and wrote an AP American Government test. Later in his career, he actually taught that exact AP course at a high school in Massachusetts.

Despite its many critics, the College Board's AP program is one of the fastest-growing in the U.S. Participation has more than doubled since 2001. In 2003-04, 1.1 million high school

Frank DiMaria is a writer for The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Edu-cation. Condensed, with permission, from The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, 23 (March 18, 2013), 21-23. For more information, visit www.hispanicoutlook.com.

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Re-Evaluating AP Courses

students participated in AP, taking 1.8 million exams. Just four years later, 1.6 million high schoolers participated, sitting for 2.7 million exams. This rapid expansion, Tierney feels, has led to a decline in the quality of AP courses. As the program grows, AP teachers move more slowly through each course, covering material more superficially.

There are two significant reasons for the program's rapid expansion. School districts en-courage students to enroll in AP courses because having large numbers of AP students looks good on paper. Today it's not just America's colleges that are ranked, so too are America's high schools. Years ago, edu-cation writer Jay Matthews at Newsweek started the Challenge Index. Using a simple formula, this index ranks America's high schools. Newsweek takes the to-tal number of AP, International Baccalaureate, or Cambridge (AlCE) tests administered at a school each year and divides that by the number of seniors graduating. Newsweek ranks the school solely on this number.

"This is an absurd exercise. I don't know how anybody can presume to rank order Amer-ica's high schools in terms of quality," says Tierney. "But high schools want to increase their

standing in the rankings, so they push more kids to take AP classes."

Students also want a high ranking. Taking AP courses is one way students appear aca-demically attractive to colleges. In 2009, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute surveyed about 1,025 high school AP teachers. Ninety percent believed that their stu-dents were taking AP courses to improve their chances of being accepted by a selective college.

As more students use this tactic, AP enrollment numbers surge. Tierney says in the North-east, Middle Atlantic states, and in America's wealthier suburban schools and private schools, students are manic about get-ting into competitive colleges. "These kids think that the only way to succeed and be happy in life is if they get into only a small handful of schools. They know their chances of securing admis-sion in those schools go up the more AP courses they have on their record," says Tierney.

Inflating GPAs

The expansion in AP courses is also driven by state man-dates. California, for example, mandates state colleges and uni-versities to automatically bump students' GPAs up one point

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for an AP course, 3,0s become 4,0s on students' transcripts, "One of the things wrong with the whole AP frenzy is that students in the know can game the system by packing their high school record with six, seven, eight AP courses knowing they will inflate their GPAs and make them look better for college ad-missions," says Tierney,

Through mandates, some states even pay the $89 fee the College Board charges for an AP exam, "For some, [this fee] may be a hurdle to taking an AP course," says Tierney, In those states in which the student is responsible for the exam fee, some of the neediest high school students might be pre-cluded from taking AP courses. Despite rapidly growing AP enrollment, large percentages of minorities are essentially left out of the AP game. As a result, theyfindthemselves at a competitive disadvantage in the college admissions process.

Although the College Board definitively reports that about two and a half million students take AP exams each year, it does not report the number of minor-ity students who take AP cours-es. It does, however, track and report the number of students who do not take AP courses but are academically qualified

to do so based on their PSAT scores, "What they are finding is that there are about half a million high school students being left out of AP classes for which they were deemed ca-pable by their performance on the PSAT, Minority students are disproportionately affected," says Tierney,

In general, participation in AP courses and honors-level courses are sharply skewed along socioeconomic and racial economic lines. Even within the same school, low-income and underrepresented minority students tend to be tracked into non-college-prep classes and end up enrolling in AP courses at a much lower rate. Many inner-city schools don't even offer a single AP course,

Tierney's biggest criticism of the AP program is the courses themselves. He says they pro-vide only a broad survey of a subject area rather than the in-depth view a student gets in an actual college classroom, Tier-ney calls AP courses a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for teachers to take students down some path of mutual interest. The College Board's broad out-lines of AP courses, accord-ing to Tierney, are a mile wide and an inch deep, "In my AP

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Re-Evaluating AP Courses

class, I covered virtually every topic connected to American government and politics, what you would find in your typical American government college textbook," says Tierney. The reason? He wanted to cover all the material that would likely be on the AP exam, an approach he would never take at the col-lege level.

In each of his 25 years as a professor of American history, he taught a course that was essentially an introduction to American government. During those years, he never tried to cover everything about Ameri-can government in that one course. Instead he covered the salient topics while offering students the clearest and best conceptual understanding of how politics works, how the government operates, and how the different parts of the system connect. "I would take several days' worth of lectures to make sure they understood key con-cepts that lead to a deeper un-derstanding of political conflict, the framing of issues, and that sort of thing," says Tierney.

The high school environment did not allow Tierney to teach in the same manner. There is not enough time to offer in-depth analysis in a high school AP course, he says.

Another criticism of the AP program is the necessary diver-sion of resources to offer such a program. School districts must prepare teachers for AP courses; some give AP teachers a course remission. Some AP courses are small compared to general college-prep classes. For every AP course a school offers, it must divert resources from another class. Often the students who are losing out by this diversion of resources are minority students who are not enrolled in AP courses.

"AP courses set up a two-tier system in a high school where the AP students think of them-selves as academic elites and look down at everybody else. The other kids are left thinking that they are not up to snuff. I'd like to see schools make all their classes better," says Tierney.

The majority of students grappling with AP courses care far less about taking rigorous courses than they do about collecting college credits to shorten their stay in college. A good strategy, but it does not always work.

Colleges are not accepting AP credits at the rate they used to. When the College Board first established the AP program in the 1950s, its goal was to offer high school students a more

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challenging experience with the added benefit of allowing them to bring college credits to a college or university. "Stu-dents who have taken five AP courses have basically knocked off a semester of college tuition. That's a considerable benefit," says Tierney.

AP Credit Policy Changing

But, as students shave off semesters of college through AP courses, they also shave profit from the school's bottom line. From a business model standpoint, says Tierney, it doesn't make sense for schools to continue to give college cred-its in exchange for AP courses. Schools are not willing to give incoming freshmen credit and lose that revenue. Rather than offering students credit for AP courses, they now only allow students to opt out of an in-troductory course. "So if you took AP U.S. History in high school, you don't have to take the introductory American his-tory class in college. You can move right into upper-division American history électives," says Tierney.

Some of the more selective schools are not even allowing this. Many find high school AP courses far less rigorous than advertised and ineffec-

tive at preparing students for upper-division courses," says Tierney.

As fewer colleges offer credit for completed AP courses, more students are losing the financial advantage that AP courses origi-nally offered. The College Board, in contrast, is still reaping the financial benefits of administer-ing the program, earning the majority of its revenue from its AP courses. "It's easy to identify the cost bearers: students and parents who pay their own exam fees and the states who pick up the exam fees for everybody. In some cases, the College Board will reduce or subsidize a fee for students who can show they have financial need," says Tierney.

Although critical of the Col-lege Board, Tierney says the College Board revised its cur-riculum and expectation for its AP Biology course, a course notorious for its broad range of content. Its new curriculum offers teachers more flexibility and encourages them to devote time to labs and other teaching methods that engage students in a deeper understanding of the material. The next course the College Board will revamp is its U.S. History course. These are steps in the right direction, says Tierney. •

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