everybody needs a foundation
The College Board is promoting a rise in the number of high-school students taking Advanced Placement exams, while Kevin Drum has an interesting discussion of the potential downsides of using AP courses for college credit. In particular, some have complained that AP tests require students to learn a broad range of information without developing analytical skills.
I would agree with the depth issue: standardized tests push teachers toward teaching the test and away from developing analytical and, more importantly, writing skills. I remember some tests like the literature and U.S history exams had written portions, but to do well students needed to write in a very formulaic way. We were told that if the topic sentence fell anywhere other than the start of the paragraph, we’d be scored down.
I do think that AP tests are of some value to students. I took six AP exams in high school, which got me out of about 30 hours of coursework and a useless “AP Scholar with Distinction” award. This gave me a lot of flexibility to explore majors my first few years of college and kept me out of giant lecture classes. At the University of Oklahoma, the classes I tested out of would have been broad surveys with multiple-choice exams anyway, so I don’t see how AP classes are an inferior form of instruction. If I had been able to go to a liberal arts school or a prestige university, I might have missed out, but it seems like these lower-division classes mostly made up for deficiencies in high-school education, rather than encouraging students to think critically and communicate their ideas.
I wouldn’t blame AP tests for weak college students. Instead, the K12 system needs to develop better college prep and vocational programs and reduce the reliance on standardized testing for assessment. Unfortunately, the current political climate is pushing schools in the opposite direction.
