And here's a tidbit: Harvard itself has NO EDUCATIONAL RATIONALE for the big plum it offers to students with enough AP credits: "Advanced Standing." It allows you to graduate in three years, or to grab at the brass ring of a Masters (which is almost always useless unless it's in Statistics). There is no value added in this Harvard program, at least none that is articulated in the meetings you'd expect it to be articulated in.

Instead, Harvard acknowledges internally that it has an Advanced Standing program because otherwise it would be disadvantaged in the competition for kids with a lot of AP credit, whose parents want to cash them, for cash (i.e., one year less of tuition). The money pressure on students that results has no educational benefit.

That at least has been what I've learned, from my perches. Harvard is the place that should *lead* on the goal of keeping high-school kids from thinking too much about their schoolwork in terms of its dollar value; but it doesn't do so (and doesn't visit the question that I know of in the curricular review), because it's too afraid that it will lose even the slightest advantage in the competition for top students.

Standing Eagle
 

For The Chronicle of Higher Education, expected publication April 17, 2024

High Schools Are Not Colleges

And Should Not Strive to Be


By David W. Oxtoby

An entering student at Pomona College last fall submitted the results of 14 Advanced Placement tests, all but one with the top score of 5. In all, 20 members of the entering class each reported the results of 10 or more such exams. Obviously, these are highly talented students who will benefit from the broad range of advanced courses that Pomona offers. But it is far from clear that this proliferation of AP courses—along with the accompanying pressures—truly makes for the best high-school education, or, for that matter, prepares students to get the most out of their college years.

When I was a high school student in the 1960s, students in good schools might have taken several AP courses—all during their senior year. Now, however, in order to accumulate 10 or more AP exams, it is necessary to begin far earlier. At some high schools, a 10th-grade chemistry course (the first a student takes) is now designated as “advanced placement” so that introductory as well as college-level material can be compressed into a single year of work. In a few subjects, AP courses are now available as early as ninth grade. Can a ninth-grader truly be said to be doing “college level” work in European History?

Although I applaud the effort to make challenging courses available to growing numbers of high school students across the country, I worry that the advanced placement programs are rapidly becoming the latest way in which schools are “teaching to the test,” rather than using creativity to excite and challenge students. Too much of the high school curriculum is turning into a pale imitation of college courses instead of providing the solid foundation that students need to build on in the future, and the new pressures associated with these courses are distorting both the high school experience and the nature of the courses being taught. In high school, teachers of AP courses frequently must race through a year-long college syllabus, saving several weeks at the end to coach students for the test. They have little opportunity to innovate or to bring their own best ideas to the subject because of the sheer volume of information to be presented. Indeed, some high school AP courses attempt to cover more material than their college analogs.

Just as troubling is what happens once these students arrive at college. Too many students now enter with advanced courses on their resumés but little grasp of the all-important basics. In my own field of chemistry, those of us who teach first-year college courses could, in the past, expect our students to arrive with a solid experimental background and a good working knowledge of descriptive chemistry, the foundation for future work in the field. Now, in the name of being “advanced,” some high schools are trying to outdo colleges in their coverage of theoretical concepts, even though the students may not have the mathematics or physics background to understand the theory. In many cases, students have spent so much time studying such concepts as the quantum theory of the energy levels of hydrogen that they have no clue that silicon chips in computers are made from sand.

Another concern is the expansion of areas in which AP courses are being offered. In an earlier era, students were encouraged to take four years of mathematics, science, English, history and language in high school, with an emphasis upon the basics. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I still believe that a student who does this will be superbly prepared for college, whatever major he or she may ultimately choose. As high schools seek to become more like colleges, however, they are offering more and more specialized electives, and then inevitably a pressure builds up to create advanced placement courses in these subjects as well. My own teaching and research involves environmental chemistry, and I consider environmental science a very valuable subject for college study, when the student is well grounded in college-level work in biology, chemistry, and physics. I am not convinced, however, that a high-school AP environmental science course would be the best place for a student to engage the topic—especially at the cost of a more fundamental course in one of the core disciplines.

Of course, not every aspect of Advanced Placement is bad. Through encouragement (and in some cases additional funding) from federal, state and local governments, more and more schools are incorporating advanced material into their curricula, so that students from all walks of life—not just from elite prep schools—now have access to more challenging courses. Ironically, just as the benefits of Advanced Placement are becoming more widely available, some elite schools are turning away from those courses, arguing that their own self-designed courses are more innovative and more interesting. They are relying on their own cachet to convince colleges that advanced courses need not carry the AP label to signal rigor.

In most schools, however, the rush toward AP courses goes on unabated. In 2006, the number of students taking AP exams increased almost 10% over the preceding year. This is largely due to the growing intensity of the admissions game and the urge on the part of college applicants to seek out every advantage. In applying to colleges and universities with highly competitive applicant pools, AP scores are an easy way to signal a challenging curriculum. For applicants from schools that grant a grade premium for an AP course, they also allow students to boost their grade point average. Once students arrive on campus, AP grades can be an entry ticket to more advanced courses. But it is important not to confuse these competitive advantages in the admissions and enrollment process with advantages in actual academic performance—or with advantages in completing a college degree.

Contrary to popular belief, very few students at the nation’s top colleges and universities actually use their AP exam results to graduate early. One reason is that students tend to enjoy their college years and often are not in a hurry to enter the job market a year or a semester earlier. A second reason is that many colleges limit the number of credits toward graduation that a student can take from AP courses; at Pomona College, credits needed toward graduation can only be reduced by two courses through scores of 4 or 5 on AP exams. Although some of this may be due to self-interest (getting students to pay their full four years of tuition), it grows primarily out of a conviction that a real, year-long course at a place like Pomona College is far deeper and more substantive than even a solid high school AP course. A student who tries to bypass first-year chemistry (even with a 5 on the AP exam) may find second-year chemistry a daunting challenge.

As with most trends in America, marketing also plays a role in the AP phenomenon. It is worth noting that the College Board—the same organization that produces the SAT—not only produces AP tests; it also defines standards for AP courses and carries out audits that approve the use of the AP label by high schools. With a cost to the student of $83 per exam, is it any wonder that the College Board also encourages excessive test-taking by extensively publicizing the names of students who have taken the largest numbers of AP tests? For example, the firm now sends a “National AP Scholar Certificate” to every student who takes eight or more tests and receives a grade of 4 or higher on each one. My own favorite award is the “AP State Scholar,” given to two students (one male, one female) with the largest number of grades of 3 or more on AP exams. One of these days, I'm sure, a student will achieve a middling score on all 37 exams (having paid more than $3000 for the privilege), though it's hard to say what the benefit to the student might be.

Advanced Placement tests have become such a popular tool for students (and parents) desperate to increase their chances in the competitive admissions lottery—and for high school administrators eager to raise their schools’ academic profiles—that this phenomenon has taken on a life of its own. The arms race leading to more and more AP courses and exams is not likely to slow without a concerted effort on the part of American colleges and universities to rein it in. One positive step would be to limit the number of AP scores that could be submitted by any one student. Admissions offices also need to communicate with schools that an AP label is less important than having a challenging and innovative course. Above all, there need to be more opportunities for college and high school teachers to talk with each other about the kind of high-school curricula that best prepare students for college, taking into account the real differences between the secondary and post-secondary levels of education.

The truth is that making our high schools more like colleges will not necessarily help them provide a superior education. Nor will it necessarily provide their graduates with a better preparation for success when they encounter true college-level work.



David W. Oxtoby is president of Pomona College
 

What a wonderful example MIT is setting for the higher education community:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=518567

This is in contrast to what Harvard teaches students about power and accountability.

At MIT, if you lie you are dismissed, even if your work is good and you are loved by the students. At Harvard, if you lie you may --perhaps-- be quietly be given a University Professorship and a handsome pot of money.

Two different approaches to the moral education of undergraduates.