Advanced Placement courses and exams are crucial for students
hoping for admission to top universities. But they haven’t
always been ““ and they shouldn’t be now.
The AP program’s original purpose was to “provide
assistance in placement and the awarding of college credit”
to high school students, according to the College Board’s Web
site.
With 10 times as many students taking AP classes as in 1980,
according to The New York Times, it would be easy to think that the
College Board has been successful in its aims.
But as the program has grown in popularity, students and schools
alike have begun to move away from the program’s original
purpose.
Instead, students use them to inflate their grade point averages
and pad their applications, sometimes taking advantage of the fact
that colleges accept students before their AP scores are available
for consideration. Similarly, high schools use AP courses to raise
their reputations.
These uses of the program are problematic because they inflate
the value of AP courses. According to The Times, Harvard University
no longer gives credit to students who received a score lower than
five (out of five) on the exam. Even the College Board is concerned
with the quality of the classes at some schools.
Another valid concern is that these exams have become a largely
expected ““ almost necessary ““ part of admissions. And
while admissions policies differ from university to university
(some, like Binghamton University, told The Times they take AP
courses into consideration with a holistic approach), many
universities just tally a student’s number of AP courses.
This contributes to a circular rationale. Students take more AP
courses to make their applications more distinctive, while
university admissions processes encourage students to take even
more AP courses (as long as they can receive good scores) in order
to compete with this influx of AP-loaded applications. This
encourages students to see their education as merely a numbers
game.
The program needs to be reconsidered and revamped to return to
its original purpose: letting high school students earn college
credit. Until then, universities should change the undue
consideration they give to AP classes.
The AP program’s ability to prepare students is debatable;
various studies have come to different conclusions. But one study
conducted by two professors at the University of Virginia, which
questioned the AP program’s effectiveness, noted exam scores
are not the strongest indicators of student success at a
university.
According to the study, classes based on
“depth-over-breadth” curriculum ““ science classes
requiring ample mathematical skills and lab experiments that
encouraged student exploration rather than finding predetermined
results ““ were found to help students succeed later in
college, whether or not they were part of the College Board’s
AP program.
These are indicators of success that universities can take just
as seriously ““ if not more ““ until the AP program is
refreshed to original effectiveness.
With the College Board pushing so hard to prove its exams’
merits, and with President Bush trying to use standardized testing
as a salve for the nation’s ailing education system, it will
take the authority of a prominent university or university system
““ like UCLA and the University of California ““ to
question its problematic aspects.