The love-hate relationship with Advanced Placement

By Marsha Sutton

Unlike the San Dieguito Union High School District, the cash-strapped San Diego Unified School District requires students to take the Advanced Placement exam to receive the weighted grade credit for an AP class, and, to ensure equity and fairness, is now in its second year of paying for all exams. This expense is costing the district about $800,000 annually.
Almost all high schools give students an extra point for grades in AP classes. In regular classes, an A is a 4.0, a B is a 3.0 and a C is a 2.0. In AP classes, weighted grades are awarded, with an A worth a 5.0, a B a 4.0 and a C a 3.0. Weighted grades are often awarded for Honors classes as well. This gives students a higher grade point average.
At SDUSD, students must take the exam – and prior to the 2008-2009 school year, were forced to pay the hefty price of $86 per test – to get the higher grade point average – leading one student to comment, “I ‘bought’ the higher grade point average by paying for the AP tests. It still bothers me that my SDUSD classmates who didn’t have money for AP tests were penalized with lower GPAs.”
So SDUSD students with a B in an AP class must take the AP exam and, whether they pass the exam or not, will receive a 4.0 for the class instead of a 3.0. If they don’t take the exam, they will get a 3.0.
San Diego Unified appears to be the only district in the county that has this policy, which does not require that students pass the exam, only that they take it.
San Dieguito – along with other San Diego County school districts, including Oceanside, Poway, Grossmont and Sweetwater – does not require students to take the AP exam, or to pass it, to receive the weighted credit. The extra point is automatically given if a student enrolls in and completes the AP class.
The College Board, said San Dieguito’s associate superintendent of educational services Rick Schmitt, “has a pretty strong position on equity and access, and we’ll never be in a position where we can pay for kids to take the test.”
All districts offer a reduced, $5 fee for the exam to low-incoming students who qualify for the free and reduced-price lunch program. But for many struggling families that earn just enough to disqualify their children from the low-income rate, $86 per exam is prohibitive.
San Diego Unified began paying for all exams after some parents protested that forcing students to pay $86 per exam to receive the weighted grade discriminated against families that could not afford the cost but were not poor enough to qualify for the $5 rate. Also, the policy bordered on payment of money for grades.
It is not unusual for students on the fast track with hopes of attending elite universities to take up to four AP classes per year during their junior and senior years of high school. Even some sophomore students take AP classes, which are designed to be delivered in the instructional manner and fast pace of a college course and can give students college credit for a passing score on an AP exam.
This can cost $700 to $800 per student for AP tests, a not insignificant sum of money for middle-class families.
The College Board, a nonprofit organization that oversees the nationwide Advanced Placement program, charges $86 per exam and allows schools to retain an $8 rebate. For low-income students, the College Board provides a $22 fee reduction and schools are expected to forgo the $8 administration fee. So qualifying students would pay $56 per exam. States offer additional fee reductions, which in California is $51, leaving students in poverty to pay $5.
San Dieguito charges $96 per exam, Schmitt said, to cover extra costs to administer the tests. The biggest expense is renting space – plus desks, tables and chairs – in venues large enough to handle 400 to 500 students being tested at one time.
“We don’t test on campus because we feel that’s not the best test environment for kids,” Schmitt said, citing distractions like ringing school bells and lunchtime noise.
The exams are administered instead at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, which is large enough to accommodate the district’s 5,900 AP tests that San Dieguito students take.
Schmitt said the extra $10 exam charge is used to cover the costs of hiring people to proctor the tests, because teachers are not allowed to have any contact with their students on test day, according to College Board regulations, Schmitt said. Also, teachers need to be on campus with other students teaching other classes during AP testing.
Schmitt also said the district has hundreds of special education students who take AP classes and exams and require special, sometimes one-on-one, assistance.
“Sometimes they get the test read to them, sometimes they get extended time,” he said. “That’s a big deal and it’s expensive.”
Schmitt said the extra money, if there is any, is kept in a special Testing Account. “We’re not in the business to make money,” he said. “But you don’t want to lose money.”
Teachers changing grades
Although San Dieguito is aligned with other school districts, except SD Unified, in offering the weighted credit for AP classes without requiring the AP exam, it stands alone in its policy of not permitting teachers to go back after class grades have been posted and change students’ grades based upon the scores they received on their AP exams, which are not released until the summer.
Calling this unfair to students who don’t take AP classes and aren’t allowed to have their grades changed based on the results of other out-of-classroom tests like state-mandated annual standardized achievement tests, Schmitt said the practice is “inconsistent with how we treat all our kids. Why would we change a kid’s grade in an AP class when kids in other classes don’t have that opportunity? Why would we give the AP kids a special deal?”
Schmitt added that allowing teachers to go back and change grades favors kids who can afford to take the AP test. And for districts that don’t pay for every AP exam, it’s a fairness issue. So at San Dieguito, the course grade stands as the student’s final grade.
“The course is equally as important as the test,” he said. To change grades after the completion of the course “devalues some of the work over the long haul. And it doesn’t seem right.”
Schmitt said it is not a board policy to prohibit teachers from changing grades but is a practice. “We just asked all of our teachers not to do it,” he said.
But other districts – including San Diego Unified, Grossmont, Poway, Oceanside and Sweetwater – do allow the practice.
Grossmont Union High School District director of curriculum Robin Ballarin said some Grossmont teachers will move the course grade from a B to an A if a student scores a 5 on the AP exam.
“The teacher’s perspective is it’s an additional incentive [to] … encourage you to study harder or work better,” she said. “They will move you one grade up because you’ve mastered the content enough to earn the best score that the College Board can give.”
At the Poway Unified School District, grades can even be lowered if a student does poorly on an AP exam.
And at La Jolla High School in San Diego Unified, the weighted credit can be withheld if teachers believe students have not tried their best on the AP exam, which LJHS counselor Beth Behnke said is determined by observing student behavior during the test.
Behnke said the school would not give credit for the AP class if a proctor saw a student “come in and sign their name on the answer sheet and lay their head down during the exam, or attempt to leave halfway through … It’s happened before,” she said.
But determining whether students performed their best and still failed the AP test, or failed deliberately, can be tricky.
“How do you referee that?” said San Dieguito’s Schmitt. “I don’t know how they judge that. That seems like an awful lot of judgment involved, and that’s usually not a good place to be.”
The problem stems from SDUSD’s policy of requiring students to take the AP exam, even though they don’t have to pass it, to get the weighted credit.
Behnke acknowledged that proctors wouldn’t know if a student pretended to be working on the exam but was simply filling in bubbles randomly, because schools don’t receive the tests back from the College Board.
The changing face of AP
An integral part of the AP program is the final AP exam, a standardized test given in the spring that tests students on the curriculum taught over the course of the school year.
Often described as grueling, AP exams can last up to four hours and are scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 or higher considered passing. Scores are released in the summer. College credit at many universities is given for scores of 3, 4 or 5, depending upon each university’s own criteria.
The College Board’s Advanced Placement program has seen rapid growth and significant transformation since it was first introduced more than 50 years ago as a way to offer college credit to highly gifted high school students through challenging coursework.
Over the years, that narrow scope has broadened, and today’s AP courses, still rigorous, are accessed by many more students than originally targeted, even while worrisome statistics show that the pass rate among all AP test-takers is steadily declining, as shown in the College Board’s latest AP report.
Bucking the trend is San Dieguito, where both the numbers of students taking AP classes and AP exam pass rates have increased in the last five years.
As the AP program has grown to become ubiquitous at nearly every high school in the country, however, so has criticism, over concern that its rapid expansion has resulted in compromised quality.
“I like to see kids push themselves academically, but there are many kids who take APs as a matter of course because of the culture of the community, whether they have any interest in or passion for the subject at all, which should be their primary reason for taking an AP course,” said Mia Boardman Smith, English teacher and journalism adviser at Torrey Pines High School. “There are definitely far more kids in AP classes than are qualified for them.”
“It’s all breadth and no depth,” said Laura Preble, English and creative writing teacher at West Hills High School in the Grossmont Union High School District. “Kids learn tons of material, but very little of it is deep or interpretive, mostly regurgitating mass amounts of knowledge. I’ve actually had kids tell me they take my college prep class because they actually want to learn something rather than just tally up a bunch of information.”
A New York Times survey of more than 1,000 AP teachers released April 2009 found that more than half said that “too many students overestimate their abilities and are in over their heads.” About 60 percent said that “parents push their children into AP classes when they really don’t belong there.”
The survey of AP teachers also found that 90 percent said AP classes were taken by students “who want their college applications to look better” and only 32 percent said students were interested in the academic challenge. Furthermore, 75 percent of teachers said school administrators were pushing AP classes and tests “to improve their school’s ranking and reputation in the community.”
The Newsweek list
Contributing to the popularity and growth of the AP program has been Newsweek’s annual list of the nation’s top high schools, which are ranked based on the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in one year divided by the number of graduating seniors.
So the more AP tests taken, the higher the school’s Newsweek ranking – no matter whether students pass their tests or not.
“Newsweek’s all about participation,” said Schmitt. “They don’t care about performance, it’s just participation.”
The program has received criticism from national education experts, some of whom object to the Newsweek list and the way AP has been repositioned for growth.
Patrick Welsh, an English teacher from Virginia who has taught AP literature and composition for 28 years and for nine years has graded AP exams for the College Board, says the original intent of the AP program was a “noble one,” but times have changed.
“In the last 10 years, Advanced Placement has become a game of labels and numbers, a public relations ploy used by school officials who are dumping as many students as they can into AP courses,” writes Welsh in The New York Times Style Magazine’s December 20, 2009 issue.
Welsh claims the expansion in the number of AP test-takers has been fueled at least in part by the Newsweek list, which divides the number of tests given at a school – regardless of passing rates – by the number of students in the senior class.
“Given the pressure of those rankings, maybe school administrators can be forgiven for beating the bushes to find students to take AP exams even if those kids do not have the remotest chance of getting the kind of score that will give them college credit,” Welsh says.
“In the process, Advanced Placement has become the College Board’s cash cow as each year tens of thousands more students – or their school boards – fork over an $86 fee for each exam,” Welsh notes.
College Board’s cash cow
Trevor Packer, vice president for the Advanced Placement program at the College Board, estimated that 1.7 million high school students now participate in the AP program, up from 700,000 students in 1999. At $86 per exam, that equals $146.2 million, a hefty sum to be sure.
However, many of these test-takers are low-income students who qualify for fee waivers. On the other hand, many students who pay full price take more than one AP exam. But the exact amount of money the College Board takes in for AP exams is unknown.
“We don’t disclose revenue from individual tests, programs or services,” said Jennifer Topiel, executive director of communications for the College Board, in an email. But she said that revenue generated by the not-for-profit organization is “all reinvested in our programs and services” and stressed that AP “is one of the most expensive testing programs in the world to operate.”
Topiel said AP exam fees fund the hiring of thousands of professors and teachers to grade the exams, the annual development of each AP exam, the shipping of millions of exam materials to and from schools each spring, teacher professional development opportunities, new services to simplify the AP administrative burden for schools, and initiatives to promote equitable access.
Despite the uneasiness, most educators believe AP has a rightful place in high schools and serves an important function in preparing more students for academic success and the rigors of college, if presented properly.
“Kids take AP classes for different reasons,” Schmitt said, citing three. Many take it because they want the experience, some because they want a more impressive high school resume, and others because they want to score high on the exam and be able to waive some college classes. “I think the majority of kids do it for the resume,” he said.
Nevertheless, Schmitt said that challenging AP classes can help prepare students for college and are beneficial, as long as districts provide “the right instruction and the right support and the right resources.”
Marsha Sutton can be reached at: SuttComm@san.rr.com.
[Portions of this story are reprinted from a three-part series of articles that ran in San Diego News Network (www.sdnn.com) on Feb. 22-24, on the controversies surrounding the College Board’s Advanced Placement program.]