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"Asserting that AP classes are not equivalent to classes where he went to school is unhelpful. Mr. Tierney fails to mention that he went to Yale, making this an
by glimcat 14y ago
"Asserting that AP classes are not equivalent to classes where he went to school is unhelpful. Mr. Tierney fails to mention that he went to Yale, making this anecdote disingenuous at best."
I did my first two at a community college. While I don't doubt that you can find some high school courses equivalent to or superior to their college analogues, this is not the prevailing reality.
But such positive outliers have little to nothing to do with the AP brand, and much more to do with the course's teacher. They certainly have nothing to do with AP testing for equivalency credit, which occurs after the fact. AP testing is a shoddy placement tool which frequently and provably tends to overstate students' preparedness for advanced studies.
In STEM fields, anyway. Freshmen distribution survey courses don't do much to prepare you for anything particular, even at Yale.
- mjn 14y ago> In STEM fields, anyway. Freshmen distribution survey courses don't do much to prepare you for anything particular, even at Yale. I actually found my humanities requirements the most useful of my intro courses, as a CS major, outside the actual CS courses themselves. The required physics and chem classes were intellectually interesting and perhaps useful for understanding the world, but I've never really used them in my work. On the other hand, my philosophy classes taught me how to write long-form scholarly essays, which construct and refute arguments and cite the literature as appropriate. In my current career as a CS academic, that's a quite core part of my job, and is something I didn't learn at all from my STEM courses. I'm glad I wasn't able to test out of those, because we sure didn't learn how to do that in high school AP English!