Is AP Too Good To Be True?
Critics fear the rapid spread of Advanced Placement classes is diluting quality
AP was never intended to be at the center of the admissions frenzy, of course. When the program was first developed in 1955, it was designed to give the highest-achieving students, mostly at elite schools, a chance to tackle some college-level coursework--and earn college credit--while still in high school. Placement was the goal, not admissions, thus the name. In the 1980s, though, more and more high schools, seeing how well AP's rigorous subject matter and challenging tests were preparing kids for college, began to add the courses to their curricula. As the program became more popular (and selective colleges continued to show interest in AP students), more parents, believing all students could benefit from exposure to the high-level material covered in AP courses, demanded access. More schools opened the classes to students of all levels, regardless of their ability. Which, of course, had some unintended consequences. Cambridge Rindge & Latin in Massachusetts, for example, offered only one section of AP U.S. History 20 years ago. Today, there are between six and eight sections every year in a school with 1,800 students--which means half of each class is now considered "advanced."
This increased access has had an unmistakable bright side: a dramatic increase in the number of minorities and low-income students enrolling in AP courses. In the past decade, especially, the College Board has given high priority to making AP available to groups that have not, historically, taken the courses. The number of AP exams taken by low-income kids jumped from 32,688 in 1993 to 144,532 ten years later, with minority numbers experiencing a similar leap.
High stakes. Some analysts wonder, though, whether all of these new students are really doing college-level work. Teens typically receive bonus points on their grade-point averages for completing AP courses. But in a study to be published this fall, Saul Geiser, a research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California-Berkeley, comes to the stark conclusion that in California, at least, there is little to no correlation between simply taking an AP course and students' first- and second-year college GPAs. (A study of students in Texas drew a similar conclusion.) Doing well on AP exams is another matter, Geiser says: High test scores are one of the best predictors of college success. But since only about two thirds of California students in AP courses actually take the exam, for many kids the classes themselves are where AP begins and ends. At one time, Geiser says, good grades in AP classes may have been a reasonable barometer of academic ability, but he thinks colleges need to reconsider using AP coursework alone as a criterion in high-stakes admissions. "AP is being used for a purpose for which it has never been validated," he says.
The UC system's powerful statewide admissions board, which commissioned his study, is now considering dropping the bonus points it currently awards for AP courses when calculating GPA s. And the stakes are high: Admissions experts say that by threatening to downgrade the status of AP, much as it did when it considered dropping the SAT in 2001, UC, with its 208,000 students, could do a lot of damage to the program's reputation.
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