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Yes, but at what cost? Students these days have an enormous amount of stress. There may be reasons to limit the number of AP courses they are "allowed" to tak

Yes, but at what cost? Students these days have an enormous amount of stress. There may be reasons to limit the number of AP courses they are "allowed" to take so that they can maintain a healthy balance in life.

setr 7y ago
It's an awkward discussion because really, it's on a per-student basis, based on skill (if most AP courses are easy...), background (if I already get tutored in half my AP courses, before even starting them..), home-life (if I'm already anti-social/introverted, being stressed by AP courses is preferable than being stressed by forced social activities), hobbies/knowledge (if I have programming as a hobby, then I probably wouldn't count think of AP programming course as particularly stressful, or even difficult; that AP statistics course on the other hand...), quality of the AP course itself (AP stats might be harder for everyone than AP english, meaning AP english is overvalued (or AP stats undervalued) against the limit), etc, so it's to claim there's really an appropriate "limit". And even if you find that there is an easy limit, and simply override the special cases, you have the issue/philosophy that the limit might have been increased had you applied that pressure. Really, its the same as college; you're free to take as many "difficult" (or perhaps, interesting) courses as you'd like, and you'll be better off in the long run for having done more (lower students/teacher ratio, better teachers, faster/higher quality learning, more interesting/specific subjects, etc) The main difference is that its the parent who has the responsibility pre-college, whereas its the student post-college. To determine what's appropriate, and to judge what can be handled. Perhaps better than an arbitrary limit is greater fluidity in transitioning - eg make it easy to drop from AP to normal courses within a semester, when it's determined the workload is too much. Or better metrics for evaluating workload as the problem, versus other issues. Or maybe even target the parents for improvement (if they're failing to detect and react to issue). That is, the ideal solution would really be that the system can dynamically re-arrange itself as necessary, based on the input of the student/teacher/parent, instead of hardcoding arbitrary limitations. And its not an area that really deserves a simple, good-enough solution, because as the GP said, the decision can be monetarily significant. And as I've claimed, the decision can also have significant impact on the student's future education. It's perhaps too important to impose a limit for "child's sanity's sake", and be done with matter.
rayiner 7y ago
You know what’s not “healthy” and “balanced?” One extra year of college debt.

setr 7y ago

It's an awkward discussion because really, it's on a per-student basis, based on skill (if most AP courses are easy...), background (if I already get tutored in half my AP courses, before even starting them..), home-life (if I'm already anti-social/introverted, being stressed by AP courses is preferable than being stressed by forced social activities), hobbies/knowledge (if I have programming as a hobby, then I probably wouldn't count think of AP programming course as particularly stressful, or even difficult; that AP statistics course on the other hand...), quality of the AP course itself (AP stats might be harder for everyone than AP english, meaning AP english is overvalued (or AP stats undervalued) against the limit), etc, so it's to claim there's really an appropriate "limit". And even if you find that there is an easy limit, and simply override the special cases, you have the issue/philosophy that the limit might have been increased had you applied that pressure. Really, its the same as college; you're free to take as many "difficult" (or perhaps, interesting) courses as you'd like, and you'll be better off in the long run for having done more (lower students/teacher ratio, better teachers, faster/higher quality learning, more interesting/specific subjects, etc) The main difference is that its the parent who has the responsibility pre-college, whereas its the student post-college. To determine what's appropriate, and to judge what can be handled. Perhaps better than an arbitrary limit is greater fluidity in transitioning - eg make it easy to drop from AP to normal courses within a semester, when it's determined the workload is too much. Or better metrics for evaluating workload as the problem, versus other issues. Or maybe even target the parents for improvement (if they're failing to detect and react to issue). That is, the ideal solution would really be that the system can dynamically re-arrange itself as necessary, based on the input of the student/teacher/parent, instead of hardcoding arbitrary limitations. And its not an area that really deserves a simple, good-enough solution, because as the GP said, the decision can be monetarily significant. And as I've claimed, the decision can also have significant impact on the student's future education. It's perhaps too important to impose a limit for "child's sanity's sake", and be done with matter.

rayiner 7y ago

You know what’s not “healthy” and “balanced?” One extra year of college debt.