AP Courses - mounting burden, declining benefit (SF Chronicle)

For many high-school juniors and seniors, this school year has been the year of the AP, a nonstop rush of drills, flash cards and night-before cramming. In every advanced-placement class, students devote an immense effort to studying for these tests; they buy prep books, stay excessive hours after school and spend a disproportionate amount of time on AP over their regular classes.

As one of many AP students, I've experienced the madness myself. Perhaps it is part of our nature, as "top-tier" students dedicated to success, but at its core, the work ethic of the majority of AP students represents an unhealthy obsession with the AP test.

The AP tests are nationwide standardized tests administered by the private College Board association. Successfully passing an AP test will count toward college credit and, depending on the college or university, may grant exemptions from certain general-education courses. For many high schools, it represents the highest class level for students taking a particular course.

While preparing for AP tests is not so much of a problem, the issue for almost any AP student is that their focus on passing the test takes precedence over the subject matter of the course. Students spend days and days practicing how to manage their time on the essay prompts, and learning the grading process that AP scorers use, and listening endlessly to the useless "Guessing is good if you can eliminate one answer choice" rubbish. Interest in understanding the actual subject takes a backseat, and worst of all, confined by the College Board-defined AP curriculum, teachers are stripped of the power to direct the AP-crazed students toward actual subject comprehension. School administrators, with their "pass the AP" mandate, are about as inclined to teach the subjects as students are to learn it.

All of the time wasted and knowledge lost in studying for the AP test aside, if a student actually needed nighttime and weekend study sessions, third-party prep books and a specialized class just to pass a test, one must wonder if passing the AP exam really means anything to them anyway. Those who have immersed themselves in this AP trap of test drills and endless study are really fooling themselves into a false sense of security that a score of 3 or 4 or 5 on some AP means that they're "smart," that they can get into a UC campus, that they're ready for UC.

As for teachers, have they blindly accepted this "pass the AP" mantra as simply part of the job description? Any teacher who has ever taught an AP class knows every hour wasted on explaining how AP graders score essays is an hour that could have been used to educate students on something of real substance. Every AP teacher knows that the AP syllabus, mandating what must be taught, restricts the teachers' freedom in what the class can learn. Despite this, teachers seem willing to approach the standard AP formula as simply another quirk in the education system that must somehow be accommodated.

As students, we shouldn't buy into this "failing AP equals Apocalypse" paranoia, this "Oh my God, the AP seems so hard and if I fail I've got no future, I've got to do everything humanly possible to prepare for it!" This is what puts us into a black-or-white, "will this help me on the AP or not?" perspective that distracts us from real education. We don't need AP prep books or daily after-school study sessions, and if any students still feel they do, they need to reassess their ability to handle an AP course.

Teachers, similarly, need to realize that they don't need to gear their classes to training for a test; teaching it like any other non-AP class, they will discover that those students who understand the material will be able to pass it, and others will not, simply because they're either lazy or unable to grasp the subject. Both teachers and the administration need to realize that a student will never fail an AP test for a lack of test preparation.

Maybe the best solution, then, is to completely drop the college credits and the AP test itself, thereby eliminating all the competitive pressure and failure anxieties of today's AP courses. We would return classroom autonomy to the teachers, and, with a de-emphasis on competition and achieving a good score "on paper," the administration, teachers and, most especially, the students can get back to an environment where we're more concerned with learning about a subject, rather than learning how to pass the subject on a test.