6 ms·

AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

39 points by marklabedz 14y ago

wmf 14y ago
If AP classes don't give credit, I wonder if this will lead some students to graduate high school after three years.
- jlarocco 14y ago
  And get a jump start working on their Bachelor's degrees which now take six years. Seems like the high schools need to add some more rigorous classes for seniors.
  - wmf 14y ago
    Why take any classes that aren't required? I get the impression that "education" is now a luxury and most kids today need to get to a degree as fast as possible so they're merely saddled with debt instead of totally crippled. In that mindset, the only purpose of high school is to either get into college or get into some vocational training as soon as possible. Maybe only rich people are applying to Dartmouth, though.
  - roguecoder 14y ago
    A high school degree ought to be good for something. Students are entitled to four years of effective free education. If high schools can't engage them I think the government should be on the hook for the bill for the first year of college.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      I would prefer they figure out why High School has become so devalued and fix that. We should respect both the student's time we are requiring and the taxpayers who are paying for a defective product. Buying students a year of college doesn't fix the problem and acknowledges that we wasted their time.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Seems like a high school diploma should guarantee a basic level of competency with literacy, math, and scientific knowledge. 2/3 of first year college students in the US have basic or below basic levels of proficiency with the English language.
  - cschneid 14y ago
    My girlfriend teaches high school. Another teacher there teaches a class sponsored by a local community college. The curriculum is strict, and the teacher needs a masters to qualify. And then the kids end up with real college credit.
  - andrewchoi 14y ago
    I think that the quoted statistic is misleading. For the students that are at top-tier universities like Dartmouth, the vast majority of students are still graduating in 4 years: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/highest-grad-rate http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/... I think that the 6 year figure is due to an extraordinarily long tail.
- protomyth 14y ago
  I took classes at the local community college at night of my Junior year in HS, and during the afternoon of my Senior year since my HS didn't have AP courses (heck, they didn't teach trigonometry or above in Math). It seems like a pretty good strategy then and it will probably be going forward. Community College tend to have better 100 level courses since you get a person hired as an instructor. Graduating early just mean problems in the dorms and paying for expensive 100 level courses.
dkroy 14y ago
I know that the AP system is under-fire, but this just screams money grab technique to me...
adrockdust 14y ago
Accompanying headline: My Kid With AP Credits Will No Longer Be Applying to Dartmouth
- baddox 14y ago
  Or, what's more likely for most people: Kids with AP Credits Will Now Have Slightly More Debt After Graduating From Dartmouth.
  - adrockdust 14y ago
    Wait, why will they have more debt than non-AP credited kids?
    - showerst 14y ago
      Not "more debt that non-AP credited kids", "more debt than they otherwise would have if Dartmouth took their AP credits".
      - baddox 14y ago
        Yes, pardon my slight ambiguity there.
    - toomuchtodo 14y ago
      No, they would have more debt because the credits AP credit provides are cheaper than the "premium" credits you'll now have to get through Dartmouth instead.
  - Steko 14y ago
    Twist ending: Dartmouth reconsiders decision to drop AP credits
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Maybe the AP system has degraded over the years. When I was in school it helped immensely and I was able to enter college as a mid-year sophomore and graduate early. And the level of material and rigor in AP courses seemed roughly comparable to 100 and 200 level college courses. The cynic in me sees this as a money making move, as it means that more incoming students will have to pay more to graduate. I'm really curious whether Dartmouth performed any studies on the matter or if this is just a spontaneous decision based on anecdotal evidence. P.S. Also, in my experience and observation taking 100 and 200 level classes in college is a pretty significant ripoff outside of perhaps the top 20 universities in the nation. Almost all of the time such courses tend to be taught by assistants and are heavily textbook based. For the vast majority of people pursuing a college education getting an AA at a community college and then transferring to a local state college is a far, far better option financially.
- brudgers 14y ago
  From the linked Associated Press article: Rather than award credit for an introductory course to incoming students who got the highest score on the AP test, the department gave those students a condensed version of the Dartmouth course's final exam. Ninety percent failed, Tell said. And when those students went on to take the introductory class, they performed no better than those who did not have the high AP test scores. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=169611082 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1696110...
  - maratd 14y ago
    In defense of AP tests, they're meant to replace college level courses ... not university level courses. They're equivalent to what you'd encounter at a local community college, not what you'd encounter at the top 100 research universities in the country.
    - shrughes 14y ago
      That's not what "college" means in the United States. "College" is a synonym with "University." There is sometimes some word usage where the connotations can be different, but rarely, and in particular, there's no difference in the notion of "university level courses" and "college level courses."
kevinburke 14y ago
The AP gradations are useless. If I remember right the calculus exam has about 120 possible points and you only need about a 56 to score a 5.
- danteembermage 14y ago
  I took an exam where the median score is typically zero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemati...
  - koenigdavidmj 14y ago
    Also the subject of the funniest HN thread ever: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
- Steko 14y ago
  That doesn't tell you anything (it could be hard to get 56), and your numbers appear to be wrong[1]. Site below says ~70/108 is the general threshold for a 5 on both calc exams. [1] http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ap-tests-preparation/499244-thread-ap-exam-curves.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ap-tests-preparation/499...
rayiner 14y ago
AP credits have never been a particularly great ROI. My wife went the different route of signing up for classes at the local community college. You get a lot more out of them (in the rush to keep up with the joneses, high school administrators are calling everything "AP" these days), and also colleges are quite willing to accept those credits for lower-level classes.
- brodney 14y ago
  My high school offered a joint enrollment with a nearby public university. Taking my senior year there was by far the best decision I made in high school, and way more illuminating and engaging than if I had signed up for all AP courses.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
typpo 14y ago
Some of the more cynical responses to this article ignore the fact that AP credits at Dartmouth were already strictly limited by departments on a case-by-case basis. I went in with 11 AP credits and was able to graduate at most a term early. Here are some more concrete numbers on how this change affects early graduation: - Students arrive with an average of three credits; - Nonetheless 80% of students take 4 years; - 20% of students will be required to enroll for an extra term. The net result is $4 million in extra income. [1] As a point of reference, Dartmouth's endowment is over $3.4 billion. I also want to point out that this discussion ignores reasons against AP at the high school level, which has caused some high schools to stop offering them. [1] http://www.dartblog.com/data/2013/01/010556.php http://www.dartblog.com/data/2013/01/010556.php
snake_plissken 14y ago
I don't get it. You can't make things harder than they are by their nature; sure, you can make interestingly problems, but in a discipline is a discipline. For example, general calculus hasn't changed that much in decades. The same stuff I learned in AP calc senior year of highschool, people learned freshman year of college. The only thing was, in highschool the exam questions were actual problems and not proofs of Stokes theorem or some other wildly pure math question.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I found my intro-level college calculus course to be fairly dissimilar from what we did in AP CS in high school, though I assume both can vary considerably. The main difference was that the high school course was much more calculation-oriented: a huge portion of it was just computing integrals and derivatives. I didn't find memorizing patterns for computing integrals or derivatives particularly interesting or useful: if all I need to do is compute one, Mathematica can do that much for me. What I learned in university calc, but not high-school calc, was more of the rigorous foundations of what calculus is and how it works. Part of it might be context, though: the freshman calc class was synchronized with the freshman physics and chemistry courses, so there were immediate applications where we had to figure out how to use calculus as a tool, rather than just as a standalone exercise (my high-school physics and chem courses were not calculus-based, so there was no similar synergy).
redwood 14y ago
It always felt like you were robbing yourself of really interesting college courses if you skipped them due to AP. I always saw AP as more of a gateway to college due to the prestige/GPA-boost they gave your application, rather than a real way of getting significant college credit.
- Steko 14y ago
  More important than the GPA, prestige or credits is the ability to get ahead of the curve because of prerequisites. In math many classes are closed to you without a year of multivariable and pretty much everything interesting is closed until you've taken first year calc. The same is going to be true to varying degrees for biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, psychology, econ, etc.
- caw 14y ago
  Actually, it's the reverse. If you score well on AP and then elect to take the class, you'll probably get a high grade. However, if you take the class and realize you're in over your head, you damaged your GPA. AP credits didn't count at my school for your final GPA, so fewer classes meant each class counted more. I skipped almost 30 hours of credit with AP. It still took me 5 years to graduate after switching my major 2nd year. If I had to re-take those classes I skipped, I would be 1) bored, and 2) loaded with busy work instead of being able to take classes I wanted. I have friends that had to take Calc 1, whereas I went right to calc 2. Can't say I would have wanted to take it again.
tokenadult 14y ago
The relevant pages on the Dartmouth College website http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/credit_and_placement.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/credit_... http://www.dartmouth.edu/admissions/apply/thinking/credit.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/admissions/apply/thinking/credit.ht... http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/advanced_placement_2016.pdf http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/advance... don't appear to be updated to match what is reported in the AP article. What's really news here is that Dartmouth ever granted credit for AP courses--that is unusual in the Ivy League, of which Dartmouth is one of eight members. On the other hand, there are hundreds upon hundreds of other colleges all around the country that continue to offer AP credit for AP scores on specified tests of a specified level, so each high school student who decides whether or not to take an AP test is deciding to do so based on what colleges the student is considering attending. This is no big deal. Each college decides its own policy. The policy of Harvard http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&pageid=icb.page388448 http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&pag... http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/transfer/transfer_credit.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/transfer/tra... will continue to be different from the policy of (for example) Rutgers, http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/academic-credit http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/academic-credit http://sebs.rutgers.edu/new/aptests.asp http://sebs.rutgers.edu/new/aptests.asp http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/advanced-placement http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/ad... and students will continue to compare the varied college policies on AP credit http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_get.html http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_get.htm... http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.jsp http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.j... among a lot of other trade-offs the students consider when deciding where to attend college, including whether or not they are admitted to the college in the first place.
- andrewchoi 14y ago
  This was my first reaction as well, Princeton also does not offer credit for AP classes: http://www.princeton.edu/pub/ap/ http://www.princeton.edu/pub/ap/
- brianchu 14y ago
andrewchoi 14y ago
As a current student at an Ivy League school, it's interesting to see that this is getting much backlash now. My school hasn't accepted AP credit for a while now, and it's never been a problem. Students grouse superficially, but for the most part, it's understood that they're just prerequisities to get in to the schools you want to go to.
- richeyrw 14y ago
  So my daughter is in High School and she's doing IB (International Baccalaureate) does that have any benefit for those aspiring to the Ivy League or similar?
  - andrewchoi 14y ago
    It does, AFAIK IB is respected more than AP on campus. Of course, the more rigorous subject matter will be better for her in the long run anyways.
StevenXC 14y ago
College math instructor here; I've taught Calculus III for the past three years. I always feel bad for my freshman students, particularly those in the fall semester. Some of them are prepared, and some aren't, but almost none of them have a mature understanding of mathematics that we expect in a sophomore-level course. The problem with AP from my observation (at least in math) is that it encourages teaching the test. I'm certain many of them have never seen \lim_{h->0}\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h} before, so how can they suddenly expect to understand the limit definition of a partial derivative either? I took a Calculus course in high school, skipped on taking the AP test, and then took an honors section of Cal I when I got to college to get a deeper understanding (and an easy first-semester A). I feel I made the best decision.
lightcatcher 14y ago
Possibly worth throwing into the discussion: Caltech does not accept any AP credit. However, classes can be tested out of with Caltech's own tests (which were considerably more difficult than AP tests in my opinion). Testing out of these classes removes these classes from graduation requirements. Is it possible Dartmouth is just trying to raise their academic standards rather than milk students for more money?

39 points by marklabedz 14y ago

wmf 14y ago

If AP classes don't give credit, I wonder if this will lead some students to graduate high school after three years.

jlarocco 14y ago
And get a jump start working on their Bachelor's degrees which now take six years. Seems like the high schools need to add some more rigorous classes for seniors.
- wmf 14y ago
  Why take any classes that aren't required? I get the impression that "education" is now a luxury and most kids today need to get to a degree as fast as possible so they're merely saddled with debt instead of totally crippled. In that mindset, the only purpose of high school is to either get into college or get into some vocational training as soon as possible. Maybe only rich people are applying to Dartmouth, though.
- roguecoder 14y ago
  A high school degree ought to be good for something. Students are entitled to four years of effective free education. If high schools can't engage them I think the government should be on the hook for the bill for the first year of college.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    I would prefer they figure out why High School has become so devalued and fix that. We should respect both the student's time we are requiring and the taxpayers who are paying for a defective product. Buying students a year of college doesn't fix the problem and acknowledges that we wasted their time.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Seems like a high school diploma should guarantee a basic level of competency with literacy, math, and scientific knowledge. 2/3 of first year college students in the US have basic or below basic levels of proficiency with the English language.
- cschneid 14y ago
  My girlfriend teaches high school. Another teacher there teaches a class sponsored by a local community college. The curriculum is strict, and the teacher needs a masters to qualify. And then the kids end up with real college credit.
- andrewchoi 14y ago
  I think that the quoted statistic is misleading. For the students that are at top-tier universities like Dartmouth, the vast majority of students are still graduating in 4 years: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/highest-grad-rate http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/... I think that the 6 year figure is due to an extraordinarily long tail.
protomyth 14y ago
I took classes at the local community college at night of my Junior year in HS, and during the afternoon of my Senior year since my HS didn't have AP courses (heck, they didn't teach trigonometry or above in Math). It seems like a pretty good strategy then and it will probably be going forward. Community College tend to have better 100 level courses since you get a person hired as an instructor. Graduating early just mean problems in the dorms and paying for expensive 100 level courses.

dkroy 14y ago

I know that the AP system is under-fire, but this just screams money grab technique to me...

adrockdust 14y ago

Accompanying headline: My Kid With AP Credits Will No Longer Be Applying to Dartmouth

baddox 14y ago
Or, what's more likely for most people: Kids with AP Credits Will Now Have Slightly More Debt After Graduating From Dartmouth.
- adrockdust 14y ago
  Wait, why will they have more debt than non-AP credited kids?
  - showerst 14y ago
    Not "more debt that non-AP credited kids", "more debt than they otherwise would have if Dartmouth took their AP credits".
    - baddox 14y ago
      Yes, pardon my slight ambiguity there.
  - toomuchtodo 14y ago
    No, they would have more debt because the credits AP credit provides are cheaper than the "premium" credits you'll now have to get through Dartmouth instead.
- Steko 14y ago
  Twist ending: Dartmouth reconsiders decision to drop AP credits

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Maybe the AP system has degraded over the years. When I was in school it helped immensely and I was able to enter college as a mid-year sophomore and graduate early. And the level of material and rigor in AP courses seemed roughly comparable to 100 and 200 level college courses. The cynic in me sees this as a money making move, as it means that more incoming students will have to pay more to graduate. I'm really curious whether Dartmouth performed any studies on the matter or if this is just a spontaneous decision based on anecdotal evidence. P.S. Also, in my experience and observation taking 100 and 200 level classes in college is a pretty significant ripoff outside of perhaps the top 20 universities in the nation. Almost all of the time such courses tend to be taught by assistants and are heavily textbook based. For the vast majority of people pursuing a college education getting an AA at a community college and then transferring to a local state college is a far, far better option financially.

brudgers 14y ago
From the linked Associated Press article: Rather than award credit for an introductory course to incoming students who got the highest score on the AP test, the department gave those students a condensed version of the Dartmouth course's final exam. Ninety percent failed, Tell said. And when those students went on to take the introductory class, they performed no better than those who did not have the high AP test scores. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=169611082 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1696110...
- maratd 14y ago
  In defense of AP tests, they're meant to replace college level courses ... not university level courses. They're equivalent to what you'd encounter at a local community college, not what you'd encounter at the top 100 research universities in the country.
  - shrughes 14y ago
    That's not what "college" means in the United States. "College" is a synonym with "University." There is sometimes some word usage where the connotations can be different, but rarely, and in particular, there's no difference in the notion of "university level courses" and "college level courses."

kevinburke 14y ago

The AP gradations are useless. If I remember right the calculus exam has about 120 possible points and you only need about a 56 to score a 5.

danteembermage 14y ago
I took an exam where the median score is typically zero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemati...
- koenigdavidmj 14y ago
  Also the subject of the funniest HN thread ever: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
Steko 14y ago
That doesn't tell you anything (it could be hard to get 56), and your numbers appear to be wrong[1]. Site below says ~70/108 is the general threshold for a 5 on both calc exams. [1] http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ap-tests-preparation/499244-thread-ap-exam-curves.html http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ap-tests-preparation/499...

rayiner 14y ago

AP credits have never been a particularly great ROI. My wife went the different route of signing up for classes at the local community college. You get a lot more out of them (in the rush to keep up with the joneses, high school administrators are calling everything "AP" these days), and also colleges are quite willing to accept those credits for lower-level classes.

brodney 14y ago
My high school offered a joint enrollment with a nearby public university. Taking my senior year there was by far the best decision I made in high school, and way more illuminating and engaging than if I had signed up for all AP courses.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

typpo 14y ago

Some of the more cynical responses to this article ignore the fact that AP credits at Dartmouth were already strictly limited by departments on a case-by-case basis. I went in with 11 AP credits and was able to graduate at most a term early. Here are some more concrete numbers on how this change affects early graduation: - Students arrive with an average of three credits; - Nonetheless 80% of students take 4 years; - 20% of students will be required to enroll for an extra term. The net result is $4 million in extra income. [1] As a point of reference, Dartmouth's endowment is over $3.4 billion. I also want to point out that this discussion ignores reasons against AP at the high school level, which has caused some high schools to stop offering them. [1] http://www.dartblog.com/data/2013/01/010556.php http://www.dartblog.com/data/2013/01/010556.php

snake_plissken 14y ago

I don't get it. You can't make things harder than they are by their nature; sure, you can make interestingly problems, but in a discipline is a discipline. For example, general calculus hasn't changed that much in decades. The same stuff I learned in AP calc senior year of highschool, people learned freshman year of college. The only thing was, in highschool the exam questions were actual problems and not proofs of Stokes theorem or some other wildly pure math question.

_delirium 14y ago
I found my intro-level college calculus course to be fairly dissimilar from what we did in AP CS in high school, though I assume both can vary considerably. The main difference was that the high school course was much more calculation-oriented: a huge portion of it was just computing integrals and derivatives. I didn't find memorizing patterns for computing integrals or derivatives particularly interesting or useful: if all I need to do is compute one, Mathematica can do that much for me. What I learned in university calc, but not high-school calc, was more of the rigorous foundations of what calculus is and how it works. Part of it might be context, though: the freshman calc class was synchronized with the freshman physics and chemistry courses, so there were immediate applications where we had to figure out how to use calculus as a tool, rather than just as a standalone exercise (my high-school physics and chem courses were not calculus-based, so there was no similar synergy).

redwood 14y ago

It always felt like you were robbing yourself of really interesting college courses if you skipped them due to AP. I always saw AP as more of a gateway to college due to the prestige/GPA-boost they gave your application, rather than a real way of getting significant college credit.

Steko 14y ago
More important than the GPA, prestige or credits is the ability to get ahead of the curve because of prerequisites. In math many classes are closed to you without a year of multivariable and pretty much everything interesting is closed until you've taken first year calc. The same is going to be true to varying degrees for biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, psychology, econ, etc.
caw 14y ago
Actually, it's the reverse. If you score well on AP and then elect to take the class, you'll probably get a high grade. However, if you take the class and realize you're in over your head, you damaged your GPA. AP credits didn't count at my school for your final GPA, so fewer classes meant each class counted more. I skipped almost 30 hours of credit with AP. It still took me 5 years to graduate after switching my major 2nd year. If I had to re-take those classes I skipped, I would be 1) bored, and 2) loaded with busy work instead of being able to take classes I wanted. I have friends that had to take Calc 1, whereas I went right to calc 2. Can't say I would have wanted to take it again.

tokenadult 14y ago

The relevant pages on the Dartmouth College website http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/credit_and_placement.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/credit_... http://www.dartmouth.edu/admissions/apply/thinking/credit.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/admissions/apply/thinking/credit.ht... http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/advanced_placement_2016.pdf http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/advance... don't appear to be updated to match what is reported in the AP article. What's really news here is that Dartmouth ever granted credit for AP courses--that is unusual in the Ivy League, of which Dartmouth is one of eight members. On the other hand, there are hundreds upon hundreds of other colleges all around the country that continue to offer AP credit for AP scores on specified tests of a specified level, so each high school student who decides whether or not to take an AP test is deciding to do so based on what colleges the student is considering attending. This is no big deal. Each college decides its own policy. The policy of Harvard http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&pageid=icb.page388448 http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&pag... http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/transfer/transfer_credit.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/transfer/tra... will continue to be different from the policy of (for example) Rutgers, http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/academic-credit http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/academic-credit http://sebs.rutgers.edu/new/aptests.asp http://sebs.rutgers.edu/new/aptests.asp http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/advanced-placement http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/ad... and students will continue to compare the varied college policies on AP credit http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_get.html http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_get.htm... http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.jsp http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.j... among a lot of other trade-offs the students consider when deciding where to attend college, including whether or not they are admitted to the college in the first place.

andrewchoi 14y ago
This was my first reaction as well, Princeton also does not offer credit for AP classes: http://www.princeton.edu/pub/ap/ http://www.princeton.edu/pub/ap/
brianchu 14y ago

andrewchoi 14y ago

As a current student at an Ivy League school, it's interesting to see that this is getting much backlash now. My school hasn't accepted AP credit for a while now, and it's never been a problem. Students grouse superficially, but for the most part, it's understood that they're just prerequisities to get in to the schools you want to go to.

richeyrw 14y ago
So my daughter is in High School and she's doing IB (International Baccalaureate) does that have any benefit for those aspiring to the Ivy League or similar?
- andrewchoi 14y ago
  It does, AFAIK IB is respected more than AP on campus. Of course, the more rigorous subject matter will be better for her in the long run anyways.

StevenXC 14y ago

College math instructor here; I've taught Calculus III for the past three years. I always feel bad for my freshman students, particularly those in the fall semester. Some of them are prepared, and some aren't, but almost none of them have a mature understanding of mathematics that we expect in a sophomore-level course. The problem with AP from my observation (at least in math) is that it encourages teaching the test. I'm certain many of them have never seen \lim_{h->0}\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h} before, so how can they suddenly expect to understand the limit definition of a partial derivative either? I took a Calculus course in high school, skipped on taking the AP test, and then took an honors section of Cal I when I got to college to get a deeper understanding (and an easy first-semester A). I feel I made the best decision.

lightcatcher 14y ago

Possibly worth throwing into the discussion: Caltech does not accept any AP credit. However, classes can be tested out of with Caltech's own tests (which were considerably more difficult than AP tests in my opinion). Testing out of these classes removes these classes from graduation requirements. Is it possible Dartmouth is just trying to raise their academic standards rather than milk students for more money?