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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/10/this-teenager-is-one-of-12-students-in-the-world-who-aced-the-ap-calculus-exam/ https://www.washin

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/10/this-teenager-is-one-of-12-students-in-the-world-who-aced-the-ap-calculus-exam/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/1... > Nearly 2.5 million students took a total of almost 4.5 million AP tests overall last year. Of the test-takers, just 322 obtained every point possible on an AP test, and perfect scores were logged on 21 of the 36 AP exams. Here’s the breakdown of those perfect scores: 67 in Computer Science A 55 in Spanish Language and Culture 54 in Microeconomics 36 in German Language and Culture 22 in Macroeconomics 16 in Studio Art: Drawing Portfolio 12 in Calculus AB 11 in Calculus BC 11 in Physics C: Mechanics 7 in Japanese Language and Culture 7 in Studio Art: 2-D Design Portfolio 4 in Chemistry 4 in Psychology 4 in Italian Language and Culture 3 in U.S. Government and Politics 2 in French Language and Culture 2 in Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism 2 in Statistics 2 in U.S. History 2 in Studio Art: 3-D Design Portfolio 1 in Latin ----- Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college.

dsugarman 10y ago
What constitutes a perfect score? Is it no longer a 1-5 grade or is this talking about the underlying score before normalizing to a 5 point scale or were there only 322 5s?
- fortenforge 10y ago
  This is talking about scores before normalizing.
Frompo 10y ago
Probably reflect the differing priorities of the people constructing the two different tests.
jasonjei 10y ago
I took AP Latin: Vergil in high school. That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex (I'm also not surprised Japanese has few perfect scores). I know I didn't get a passing score. I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese is so simple compared to Latin or Japanese. And from what I recall, AP Chinese tested Mandarin at a 2nd grade level, and didn't test much or any of the chengyu (成語: Chinese proverbs) of which are difficult because of the shear number to remember. Perhaps graders could tell they were native speakers, and thus raised the bar? (I took 3rd-year Chinese as a filler class "language requirement" in college and the professor expected high-school level of Chinese while she expected chicken scratch from others for the same grade.) AP Computer Science seems likely to have a good number of perfect scores. I remember a test reviewer telling me that they often overlooked syntactical errors (unbalanced parentheses) and would allow API calls to incorrectly labeled API functions. (I don't disagree, because CS is more about understanding data structures than it is knowing how to put code on paper without an IDE or reference.)
- schoen 10y ago
  > That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex Did you study Latin for several years before? I think that class is typically intended for people who have already studied Latin at the high school level for three years (most likely reading Caesar or other authors first). That would give a lot more opportunity to become familiar with Latin grammar rules.
  - jasonjei 10y ago
    Yeah, I took it from 8th grade to 12th grade. In my class of 10 or so students, only one of us got a passing score. Perhaps our teacher didn't adequately challenge us. We had read Cicero and other Latin literature yet Latin grammar always seemed so challenging for me to parse. I could make out enough meaning but never do a literal translation well enough. I took it because I couldn't speak any of the Romance languages ;) I would have taken Japanese or Chinese in a heartbeat if they were offered since I had lived in Taiwan in my middle school years. I got all the rules (declensions, conjugations, etc) but I always had trouble piecing them collectively. A lot of the declension endings would be the same (such as 4th declension nouns) and it was hard for me to differentiate between a nominative and accusative in the context of a sentence. Hence I never studied Latin in college. I'm sure the world is a much better place for that. Wow, I can't believe I am reopening old wounds from 12 years ago ;) I genuinely believe the single perfect test score is also empirical proof of the difficulty of Latin in an English-speaking world... I would much rather parse MIPS assembly all day than read Latin.
    - bricestacey 10y ago
      I agree with everything up until the reading part. I took Latin 8-12th grade and reading it, but with the assistance of our professor, was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had. We topped off the last year studying Virgil, book 2 of the Aeneid, and Juvenal. Hard, but so great
    - rincebrain 10y ago
      It's a really excellent demonstration of how difficult it can be to internalize certain things for people - I was eventually acceptably good at extracting meaning from Latin after years of taking it, but it never became anywhere near an internalized process of digesting the sentences, and my instructors were quite skilled in teaching and Latin. One of the more interesting hypotheses suggested was that Latin classes, unlike a lot of SL classes, are not nearly as "immersive" as more common ones, and a lot of the language processing hardware we've got is better at digesting from spoken immersion. (Part of that, of course, is that outside of specialized environments, we don't really have any "native" speakers; part of that is also that common "spoken" Latin was a lot simpler than the brick-by-brick construction of Vergil or Cicero.)
userbinator 10y ago
Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college. It's not surprising if you realise that AP tests can't be gamed as easily as tests designed (and possibly graded) by those who taught the students taking the tests.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Not for perfect scores, but for a 4, sure. It was pretty easy to game the written portions of the test if your teacher had grading experience.
SolderMonkey 10y ago
"Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college." I think there's a trend of becoming a better student in college, so I don't find it so surprising to ace calculus in college. myself as a counter example, I was an ace in high school passing 10/12 AP exams, and almost failed out of college--go figure?
HeavenFox 10y ago
I think that is a feature of AP Exams, not a bug. How would design a uniform final exam for all, say, Calculus I courses? Sure, you can only test the intersection of all, but that encourages the teachers to only teach that subset. Instead, AP exams test the union of all, and normalize the score so that you only need, I think, a raw score of 60/100 to get a 5 on calculus. That way, teachers are encouraged to experiment with their curriculum, and students are not overwhelmed by the need to know everything there is to know. It's really a win-win solution.
dbcurtis 10y ago
> Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college. A meter that is always pegged tells you nothing.

dsugarman 10y ago

What constitutes a perfect score? Is it no longer a 1-5 grade or is this talking about the underlying score before normalizing to a 5 point scale or were there only 322 5s?

fortenforge 10y ago
This is talking about scores before normalizing.

Frompo 10y ago

Probably reflect the differing priorities of the people constructing the two different tests.

jasonjei 10y ago

I took AP Latin: Vergil in high school. That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex (I'm also not surprised Japanese has few perfect scores). I know I didn't get a passing score. I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese is so simple compared to Latin or Japanese. And from what I recall, AP Chinese tested Mandarin at a 2nd grade level, and didn't test much or any of the chengyu (成語: Chinese proverbs) of which are difficult because of the shear number to remember. Perhaps graders could tell they were native speakers, and thus raised the bar? (I took 3rd-year Chinese as a filler class "language requirement" in college and the professor expected high-school level of Chinese while she expected chicken scratch from others for the same grade.) AP Computer Science seems likely to have a good number of perfect scores. I remember a test reviewer telling me that they often overlooked syntactical errors (unbalanced parentheses) and would allow API calls to incorrectly labeled API functions. (I don't disagree, because CS is more about understanding data structures than it is knowing how to put code on paper without an IDE or reference.)

schoen 10y ago
> That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex Did you study Latin for several years before? I think that class is typically intended for people who have already studied Latin at the high school level for three years (most likely reading Caesar or other authors first). That would give a lot more opportunity to become familiar with Latin grammar rules.
- jasonjei 10y ago
  Yeah, I took it from 8th grade to 12th grade. In my class of 10 or so students, only one of us got a passing score. Perhaps our teacher didn't adequately challenge us. We had read Cicero and other Latin literature yet Latin grammar always seemed so challenging for me to parse. I could make out enough meaning but never do a literal translation well enough. I took it because I couldn't speak any of the Romance languages ;) I would have taken Japanese or Chinese in a heartbeat if they were offered since I had lived in Taiwan in my middle school years. I got all the rules (declensions, conjugations, etc) but I always had trouble piecing them collectively. A lot of the declension endings would be the same (such as 4th declension nouns) and it was hard for me to differentiate between a nominative and accusative in the context of a sentence. Hence I never studied Latin in college. I'm sure the world is a much better place for that. Wow, I can't believe I am reopening old wounds from 12 years ago ;) I genuinely believe the single perfect test score is also empirical proof of the difficulty of Latin in an English-speaking world... I would much rather parse MIPS assembly all day than read Latin.
  - bricestacey 10y ago
    I agree with everything up until the reading part. I took Latin 8-12th grade and reading it, but with the assistance of our professor, was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had. We topped off the last year studying Virgil, book 2 of the Aeneid, and Juvenal. Hard, but so great
  - rincebrain 10y ago
    It's a really excellent demonstration of how difficult it can be to internalize certain things for people - I was eventually acceptably good at extracting meaning from Latin after years of taking it, but it never became anywhere near an internalized process of digesting the sentences, and my instructors were quite skilled in teaching and Latin. One of the more interesting hypotheses suggested was that Latin classes, unlike a lot of SL classes, are not nearly as "immersive" as more common ones, and a lot of the language processing hardware we've got is better at digesting from spoken immersion. (Part of that, of course, is that outside of specialized environments, we don't really have any "native" speakers; part of that is also that common "spoken" Latin was a lot simpler than the brick-by-brick construction of Vergil or Cicero.)

userbinator 10y ago

Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college. It's not surprising if you realise that AP tests can't be gamed as easily as tests designed (and possibly graded) by those who taught the students taking the tests.

Spooky23 10y ago
Not for perfect scores, but for a 4, sure. It was pretty easy to game the written portions of the test if your teacher had grading experience.

SolderMonkey 10y ago

"Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college." I think there's a trend of becoming a better student in college, so I don't find it so surprising to ace calculus in college. myself as a counter example, I was an ace in high school passing 10/12 AP exams, and almost failed out of college--go figure?

HeavenFox 10y ago

I think that is a feature of AP Exams, not a bug. How would design a uniform final exam for all, say, Calculus I courses? Sure, you can only test the intersection of all, but that encourages the teachers to only teach that subset. Instead, AP exams test the union of all, and normalize the score so that you only need, I think, a raw score of 60/100 to get a 5 on calculus. That way, teachers are encouraged to experiment with their curriculum, and students are not overwhelmed by the need to know everything there is to know. It's really a win-win solution.

dbcurtis 10y ago

> Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college. A meter that is always pegged tells you nothing.