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There's an important fact not mentioned in the article: schools and students often have incentives to take more AP exams. For example, I was in a school distri
by aneesh 17y ago
There's an important fact not mentioned in the article: schools and students often have incentives to take more AP exams. For example, I was in a school district where AP exams were free for students. And the schools often get special recognition based on the number of AP exams taken. Indeed, the oft-cited Newsweek high school ranking simply ranks schools by the number of AP & IB exams taken per capita; it doesn't matter what you score! (Citation: http://www.newsweek.com/id/39380 http://www.newsweek.com/id/39380). Clearly, students and schools have almost nothing to lose, and a lot to gain by taking the exams.
Given this perverse set of incentives, the only thing that surprises me is that the number of AP exams taken isn't growing faster! (We're still at about 0.3 AP exams taken per HS junior/senior)
- speek 17y agoAP courses are terribly laid out. They don't have nearly enough flexibility that they should. That's why Honors courses are usually amazing. They're more challenging than "regular" classes, but they have the freedom to pursue more interesting topics within subjects. Also, people end up teaching for the test, which is not good because will end up only knowing certain, specific, useless things.
- ZachPruckowski 17y agoNot only did we (Loudoun Valley HS, #164 on that list, 2001-2005) offer free tests if you took the class, the class grades were weighted for AP classes. An A- in an AP class was worth an A+ in a regular class, and a B+ was worth an A (+0.7 on your GPA for the class). The elimination of a lot of non-AP honors classes increased AP tests taken even more. I was in 7 APs my senior year, simply because there were two tracks: AP and general. If you had been honors-track in Middle School and early High School, you were basically pushed into taking AP History (World and US), AP Government, and AP English.