To A.P. Or Not To A.P.?
Advanced
Placement Courses have never been more popular, though some educators
wonder if they are the best way to learn--or get into college.
By Sarah Seltzer
For students in New York coveting a spot at a top college, the old mantra used to be, the more often the letters "AP" appear on a transcript, the better. Advanced Placement courses were collected like trophies on the way to an acceptance letter.
In
recent years, however, several elite private schools, including
Fieldston and Dalton, have dropped APs from their roster of classes,
while others, notably Horace Mann, have capped the number of APs a
student can take in a year. The schools want to re-emphasize
intellectual exploration over competition and testing, while also
hopefully toning down the volume of work and pressure faced by their
students.
But aside from these small, if noteworthy pockets of
change, the zeal for AP courses and credits shows no sign of abating.In
fact, to meet the demand, a leading tutoring company, The Princeton
Review, is even developing its own AP prep curriculum. They know that
nationwide interest in the AP is actually growing.
The AP
question can be a quandary for city parents: should I send my child to
a school with APs? Or, if my child's school doesn't have AP
classes, should I hire a tutor? A parent may want to protect their child
from a test-crazy atmosphere…but could that instinct actually sabotage
their child's efforts to get into certain colleges?
Hoping to
assure anxious parents, the party line among college admissions
officers is generally that these curricular gymnastics don't matter as
much as the profiles of the students themselves: "We don't admit
schools or curricula," says Marilyn McGrath Lewis, director of
undergraduate admissions at Harvard."We want to be sure that the
student has taken the most rigorous program that makes sense for her
own particular needs and interests."
A MINI-BACKLASH?
An
Advanced Placement class offers a college-level curriculum that
culminates in an exam scored from 1 to 5. High scores can be used to
place out of introductory courses in college--and sometimes grant
credit (which could mean less tuition). APs are offered in subjects
from American history and calculus to economics, art history and
Japanese.
As the college admissions game reached a manic
heyday in the last decade, students began racking up as many APs as
possible at the expense of other classes and sometimes their sanity.
It's not uncommon for some bright, ambitious students to take as many
as 5 AP classes in one semester. For some schools, though, the frenzy
reached a point of diminishing returns.
Fieldston made waves
six years ago by removing APs from its curriculum altogether. According
to Laura Clark, Fieldston's director of college counseling, the impetus
for the move came from students who were sick offeeling pressured to
take AP classes, but the faculty was on board too. According to Clark,
they wanted to be able to design new classes and linger on favorite
topics. They were also dismayed at how the concentration of ambitious
students in AP classes left other electives much weaker.
Since
Fieldston's changed policy, other schools have followed suit to varying
degrees. Dalton, Calhoun, and others no longer offer AP-oriented
classes, although Dalton still administers the exams.
Horace
Mann enforces a limit of 3 APs per year. "We're telling [students] not
to pick academic programs that will afford them no time for lunch and
no time to sleep, says HM's director of college counseling, Steve
Singer. "And we're letting them know that these things are not the be
all and end all."
EXTRA HELP
Still, the tests remain tempting as a potential leg up, even for those whose schools have limited them."People have to
take them to get ahead in their own lives, so we want to help people
take them," says Marissa Pareles, who consults and writes academic
curricula at the Princeton Review's New York office. Pareles and her
colleagues are so convinced of a growing demand for AP preparation, in
particular, that they have designed their own AP curriculum (with books
included), for popular APs like history, calculus, and biology and are
hoping to expand to others.
In addition to kids who want help
in their AP courses, the tutorials also attract students from
independent schools without APs, students who are taking advanced
courses at local coleges, and students at public schools that offer
honors courses but not APs.
Tutoring companies generally
design their AP preparation as a one- on-one tutorial, mixing
test-taking skills with a review of the course material. Pareles points
out that the APs have a unique scoring system, including multiple
choice, that's graded like the SAT. While students slave over
paragraph-long answers or well-researched papers at school, that won't
necessarily help them during the exam. "That's where we come in,"she
says.
A GROWING TREND
Another reason tutoring
companies are gearing up is pure numbers. Apart from the class of elite
independent schools mentioned above, the number of schools offering AP
courses continues to rise.
Why? One key is prestige. Newsweek
magazine's annual ranking of public schools is based on the percentage
ofstu- dents that take Advanced Placement or International
Baccalaureate tests. And a spot on the list is naturally sought-after.
In
addition, schools without the resources of a Horace Mann--that is,
schools without Ph.D-level faculty who can design classes based on,
say, advanced microeconomic theory--can use AP classes to up the
quality of their offerings. "It is a very well researched and developed
course curriculum, and the AP program also offers teacher training and
professional development," says Nancy Meislahn, dean of admissions and
financial aid at Wesleyan University. "Many schools would see this as
an efficient way to improve the quality ofteaching and learning."
And
some educators view the AP as a good way to train kids for the future.
As Emily Levy, Director of EBL coaching, a New York tutoring company,
points out, "There's a jump between high-school and college-level
thinking that the AP can bridge. It gives students a sense of what they
might see once they arrive at college."
For the College Board, this popularity has a price. "We've come
across courses like AP ceramics--there's no such thing," says Jennifer
Topiel, the College Board's executive director of public affairs. As a
result, the College Board's ongoing and massive audit of all AP classes
is requiring all teachers of classes designated "AP" to submit a
questionnaire and course materials. At the beginning of each year, the
College Board sends colleges a list of schools that have actually
earned the designation "AP." For high schools trying to compete, the
bar just got a little bit higher.
IT'S THE STUDENT WHO COUNTS
College
admissions officers stress that students' choice of challenging and
diverse classes, whether they're AP or not,is one of several key
factors they look at when determining who they'll accept. "It's about
who they are, what is the fit, how are they going to add to the
campus," says Jim Bock, dean of admissions and financial aid at
Swarthmore College.
Which is not to suggest that elite
colleges are getting softer in their academic requirements. "Basically,
we expect students by the time they're seniors in high school to be
forging some kind of intellectual identity," says Harvard's McGrath
Lewis. To help students find their intellectual passion, schools like
Fieldston and Horace Mann offer rich menus of high-level electives,
senior projects, and independent study as alternatives to APs.
But,
as a practical matter, should seniors at schools without APs spend
their free time studying for the exams anyway? Reactions among college
counselors and admissions officers tended to be guarded on this
question, taking it as a given that many ambitious New York students
will take the tests no matter what their elders advise. "The bottom
line is they're learning something," says Bock of Swarthmore. But if
students have time and energy to burn, "we'd rather see them in a
community college course where there's a dialogue. Then they're taking
a real class versus buying a book and studying for an exam." And note:
from Fieldston's perspective, their no-AP policy seems to be working
because their students are still getting into great colleges.
If
there's a consensus related to the AP issue, it's this: that a
nurtured, thriving child is more likely to be a successful applicant
down the line, and that's what parents should keep foremost in mind
when choosing secondary schools for their kids. Or as Wesleyan's
Meislahn says, "I hope that for families it's less about the AP, and
more about is this school a good match? For example, is my son or
daughter someone who needs structure, or rebels against structure?"
Besides,
as much as educators admirably try to waylay the trends, testing is
never off the table when colleges are comparing thousands upon
thousands of applications. Singer, the director of college counseling
at Horace Mann, speculates that if the APs become less popular at some
schools, students and colleges alike may increasingly turn their focus
to SAT II subject tests or something yet to be invented. "One way or
another, kids are going to have to prep for exams," he says. ✦
New York Family Magazine, p. 102, 104 | January 2007
