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07.12.06

Inside Higher Ed :: Advanced Yes, Placement No

Posted in News at 1:48 pm by leingang

I got shown an article from InsideHigherEd called “Advanced Yes, Placement No“. It’s about Phil Sadler’s report to the AAAS about the affect of AP courses on college choices and grades.

The researchers found that students who had taken AP courses — even those who had done well on the AP exams — did only marginally better than students who had not taken AP courses. Other factors, such as the rigor of mathematics taken in high school, were found to have a strong impact on whether students did well in college-level work in the sciences.

Sadler goes on to say that AP classes are not bad per se, but they should not be regarded (despite their name) as a substitute for college level material. I would agree that the emphasis we provide in college on conceptual thinking is not taught in AP courses. Some of the AP questions are actually pretty good, but they are graded in such a way to deemphasize the parts of the problems we think are the most important. Students may come to college thinking they have mastered calculus, but some of them — even those with 5’s — really only know the techniques.

A reader comment relates a story from my alma mater so I have to refer to it, too:

I graduated high school in 1965. Took AP Chemistry but the college I was going to go to (Chicago) did not accept AP credit so I did not pay the fee to take the test. I did ask the admissions office why they did not recognize the test and was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I did not think that they could do a better job teaching me Chemistry than some teacher in my high school then I should not bother paying them tuition. They were right. [I suspect that Chicago now does give some credit for AP’s, but am not sure.

–Mark Weinstein, U.S.C.