The AP Question (Golden Ram III)

For many Juniors and Seniors at Westmoor, this school year has been the year of the AP, a nonstop rush of drills, flash cards, and night-before cramming. Not to actually learn the subject. Not, even, to get a passing grade in the class. AP Students, AP Teachers, and the administration have devoted the first 8 months of the school year to taking and passing a single 3-hour test.

The Advanced Placement (AP) Tests are nationwide standardized tests administered by the private College Board association, which also administers the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Tests (PSATs) and Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs) known to many students. Successfully passing an AP Test will count towards college credit, and, depending on the college or university, may grant exemptions for certain general education courses. AP Classes are generally courses designed to train students in learning the course material for and taking the AP test, and at Westmoor represent the most rigorous class level for a particular course. Westmoor currently offers 9 AP classes: English Language 5-6, English Literature 7-8, Spanish 7-8, Statistics, Calculus, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and United States History.

Throughout Westmoor, and I expect any other high school in the United States, the ‘top-tier’ Juniors and Seniors seem to have had an unhealthy obsession with the AP tests. I should know—as one of the many AP students this year, I’ve witnessed and experienced the madness myself. Students have dedicated an immense amount of time, effort, and money to study for these AP tests; they throw money into AP prep books, stay afterschool until obscene hours of the night, and pour a disproportionate amount of time into studying for these AP tests rather than their regular classes—a dedication to passing that, before AP, most students would never dream of possessing. Even the teachers, whether out of simple pride, or job performance, or sincere dedication to students’ success, grind out time and effort to help students study for and pass the AP tests. During the week before the AP tests, our U.S. History teacher organized afterschool study sessions the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday leading up to the test, with students coming in and staying until 9:30 at night for the Wednesday night session. For AP Physics, the teacher and students came to Westmoor on the Saturday morning before the test for last-minute studying. This isn’t to say that the students and teachers were wrong in doing so—in fact, the students and the teachers especially should be commended for willing to dedicate so much of their time and effort above-and-beyond their required duty. However, this dedication, far more than an example of teacher and student work ethic, is an example of the AP obsession that our students, our parents, our teachers, our school, our entire education system, have entangled themselves into.

The problem is most readily apparent at the student level. One need only spend 5 minutes in an AP classroom (especially in the week preceding the tests) to notice a drastic change in the activities of students. Students actually pay attention, furiously take down notes, ask questions, are eager to stay afterschool or come in on weekends for more lectures. A teacher’s dream, you may think—until you realize the kind of notes they’re taking and the kind of questions they’re asking. You’ll find no “Ms. A, could you tell me what kind of things I should be doing for my essay introductions?” or “Mr. B, what kind of things factored into the start of the Great Depression?” or “Mr. C, how were electromagnetic force, electric field, potential energy, and voltage related again?” here. In AP, it’s all “Do we have to know these vocabulary words for the AP Test?” or “What kind of strategies should we use when we answer the DBQ?” or “Can you do this specific problem for us so we know how to do it on the AP Test?” While preparing for the AP tests is not so much of a problem in and of itself, the issue is that, for almost any AP student, their focus on passing the AP test has taken precedence over the regular subject matter of the course. Gaining actual insight or understanding of a subject absolutely comes secondary to knowing how to answer the problem on the AP test. Not that much different from a regular class, where students are overwhelmingly more preoccupied with getting the grades rather than learning the subject matter, you might say, but at least in the regular classes, a teacher can tailor grading scales and tests on the material itself. Instead, our AP students (much like those who prepare for SATs) 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 AP curriculum, the teachers are stripped of the power to direct the AP-crazed students toward actual understanding, and, given their ‘pass the AP’ job mandate, aren’t inclined to either.

The AP obsession has also had a profound effect on the courses and teachers themselves. In English Language AP, we’ve wasted a good deal of time memorizing vocabulary like chiasmus (Don’t let the AP consume you, and for the love of god, don’t consume the AP test booklet!) and metonymy (Fight the Man! End AP oppression!), not that knowing definitions for some obscure term like chiasmus or metonymy or zeugma will help us in developing our writing abilities or rhetorical analysis, but just because random vocabulary words like those may pop up on the AP test. In AP Physics, the line, “Okay, mechanical advantage/convection/radiation/center of mass is sort of important, but it’s not going to be on the test, so we don’t need to learn about it,” has been uttered so many times it is the de facto mantra of our class. In every single AP class, the education of our best students is being compromised by courses that waste time by teaching information that’s not the slightest bit relevant, and limit the scope of knowledge by virtually banning the teaching of any material not needed for the AP test in a mad rush to get to all of the material that is needed for the test. Part of this problem can be attributed to the College Board organization which creates and designates the material on the test, but the largest contributors to this problem are the parents, high school ranking analysts, and school administration that are hell-bent on boosting the school’s AP pass rates, whether for what parents perceive to be their children’s needs, or for a school administration doing whatever they can to appease these parents or some high school ranking formula, and thus pressure AP teachers with a narrow, singular mandate to get students to pass the AP, and nothing else.

And all for what? A huge portion of an 8-month of class dedicated all to passing a 3-hour test? 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 their passing of the AP exam really means anything anyway. Those of us that have immersed ourselves into this AP trap of test drills and endless study are really fooling themselves, giving themselves a false sense of security that a 3 or 4 or 5 on some AP means that they’re smart, means that they can get into a UC, means that they are ready for a UC. As for teachers, have they blindly accepted this ‘pass the AP’ mantra as “part of the job description”? Any teacher in the United States who has ever taught an AP class, knows every hour wasted on explaining how AP essay graders score the papers is an hour that could have been used to educate students on something of real substance. Every AP teacher in the United States knows that the AP material syllabus, mandating what must be taught, restricts the teachers’ freedom in what the class can learn. And I find it hard to believe that despite knowing the absurdity of such a system that restricts and distracts students’ education so severely, every teacher at Westmoor seems willing to approach the standard AP teaching formula as another quirk in the education system that must somehow be accommodated.

What are students, teachers, and the system to do, then? As students, it is up to us to demand a change. It is, after all, our rampant competition, our obsessive mindset, our academic interests in high school that puts us at this present situatio. We shouldn’t buy into this ‘Failing AP=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!”, which is what puts us into this black-or-white, ‘Will this help me on the AP or not?’ perspective that is our current situation of distraction from real education. We don’t need AP prep books or daily afterschool study sessions, and if any students still feels like they do, then maybe they need to reassess whether or not they are really able to handle an AP course. Teachers, similarly, need to realize that they don’t need to gear their entire class to training a class for a test, that teaching it like any other non-AP class, those students that know and understand the material will be able to pass it without a problem, and for those that don’t pass, it is simply because they do not understand the subject or are simply lazy. Both teachers and the administration need to realize that a student will never fail an AP test for a lack of test preparation. Quite simply, a student will pass or not pass the AP depending on whether they understand the material or not, and that is where the focus should be, on making sure our students understand the subject material, not making sure they know all the proper test-taking strategies.

While it is mostly the fault of students, and the duty of students to change and instigate reform, effective change, can only come from the testing system, the administrative system, and the expectations and desires of parents. Presently, the policies of the college board only serve to further the obsession of students and teachers with the AP test, by openly providing material (like past exams, sample problems, ‘rubrics’ of what graders are looking for) that gives teachers the opportunity to engage in AP test preparation (there is a greater inclination to spend an entire period running through a list of essay-writing tips when the handout is right in front of you). Perhaps the ultimate hypocrisy is when the College Board sells ‘SAT study guide’ and ‘AP prep’ books that explain strategies on how to pass its own tests! Somewhere along the line, the private administration of standardized testing by ‘non-profit’ organizations like the College Board or American College Test must be transferred to the public sector—to a state-controlled organization that doesn’t have fueling test performance competition (and sales of test-prep books and courses) as its priority. Greater efforts must be made to make AP tests less “coachable” (the only reason why students and schools are able to train so much in the first place), and although in many aspects the AP tests are already far more intuitive than tests like the SAT or California STAR because of their decreased emphasis on the more formulaic multiple-choice type questions, there is a lot of room to improve.

School administrations, meanwhile, must realize that they have strayed far away from their intended goal of preparing students for adult life. Increasingly, school administrations take a short-sighted view of “preparing students for life” to simply mean “prepare students for college admissions”. In high schools, we now devote a huge amount of resources, with counselors and various programs, to get students prepared for college, or at least, prepared on paper. It is, in a really twisted way, why some teachers so eagerly sign off on ‘Letters of Recommendation’, why counselors will sign off on the college concurrent enrollment form of virtually any student who walks into their office. This summer, Westmoor plans to hold SAT preparation workshops, to help boost the scores of our students who will be taking the SAT in 2005-2006. Almost every school program that has ever been announced, and almost every club or organization at Westmoor that I have ever been introduced to (including, regrettably, our Journalism Club at its inception), has begun with the line, “Looks great on your transcript.” Shamelessly, we hand out “community college credits” to students who are enrolled in simple high school-level courses, who have taken no test, or even demonstrated basic aptitude in the high school class, to justify it. Shamelessly, we dole out “community service hours” to students who simply show up to club meetings afterschool to pick up recycling bins or tutor students. Perhaps most ridiculous of all, we automatically boost the grade of every AP or Honors class student by 1 point, supposedly in reflection of the more “difficult” nature of the class. School administrations today have a single focus in mind, and that is not to prepare their students for life, or even prepare them for college; their primary goal is to simply get their students admitted into college. That is why we inflate the grades for our AP/Honors students. That is why we jam our students’ transcripts chock full of ‘extracurricular activities’. That is why we give students extra and unwarranted credit for things that should otherwise be considered expected duty of a club or class member (“You actually came to a club meeting? Here’s two community service hours for you!”). And that is why school administrations hammer students to do well on tests, and hammer teachers to devote their curriculum to helping them pass tests. We would like, on paper, to have the most appealing students, the most prospective to college success, students who have Theresan devotions to serving the community, students with GPAs in excess of perfect, students who will enter college with their first two years of general-ed credits already fulfilled. It is partly what has fostered the ultra-competitiveness of today’s teenagers. The actual reality of the student’s skills and knowledge is absolutely secondary to achieving the ideal transcript. It is, ironically, this rampant focus on getting students prepped for college admission that causes the lack of basic competence in freshmen that colleges so often complain about. You can chalk it up, partly, to the school administration’s desire to boost its own image, in the eyes of the states and in the eyes of prospective 8^th grade parents, by telling them just how many of our students go on to 2/4-year universities. You can chalk it up, partly, to the high school reforms instituted by universities, who for some reason believe that taking time away from real education so that more tests can be administered on students will result in more knowledgeable incoming freshmen. You can chalk it up, partly, to the bureaucratic tendencies of the State Board of Education, and its need for complete monitoring and control over the performance of local schools through standardized testing.

You can chalk up a lot of it, however, to the misguided wants and expectations of parents, who are, even more than students, teachers, or the school administration, absolutely obsessed with the ‘perfect transcript’, obsessed with getting their child the best SAT score possible, the best GPA possible, involved in the most clubs possible, the most community service hours possible, all so that they may stand a chance to get into the most prestigious university possible (because, of course, it is simply the title of your alma-mater, not your performance there, that defines your success in life). Thus, when school administrations ‘fail’ in doing all they can to boost a student’s transcript, when they, god forbid, try to actually educate students about a subject INSTEAD OF PRACTICING MORE TEST-TAKING TECHNIQUES!, or COVER A SUBJECT NOT REQUIRED BY THE AP TEST!, or FORCE STUDENTS TO GO SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL TO GET COMMUNITY SERVICE HOURS!, or DON’T PROVIDE MORE INFORMATION ON COLLEGE APPLICATIONS!, parents raise uproars (or are instigated into uproars by activists or politicians) over how the school administration is not doing enough to prepare their children, all the while blatantly ignorant to the fact that high schools are (or once were) preparing students not for success in getting into college, but for success in life, and all the while blatantly ignorant to the notion that an increased focus on test-prep and transcript-boosting will detract significantly from the time students can spend on real education.

Advanced Placement was an interesting idea and opportunity when it was introduced in 1955—give students the chance to experience a truly rigorous, college-level course while still at the high school level, providing an academic challenge for advance students and preparation for a college-level workload. Maybe it was that way a few decades ago, and maybe it still is that way in some high schools scattered around America, but realistically, in today’s education system the Advanced Placement program is nothing more than a designated course where ‘smart kids’ are thrown into, a ridiculously easy course exploited to inflate transcripts, a course used as a ploy to pump profit into the College Board and other test-prep companies, and a course where achieving each of the above takes precedence over the education of students. AP classes today can hardly be considered either ‘college-level’ or ‘rigorous; the amount of workload and in-depth study of the subject material is about the same as any non-AP class (partly because such a significant amount of time is spent reviewing test strategies and running through practice drills). Maybe the best solution then is to completely drop the college credits, and drop the AP Test, and thereby eliminate all the competitive pressure and failure anxieties of today’s AP courses. By doing this, we would return classroom autonomy to the teachers, and, with a de-emphasis on the competition and achieving a good score “on paper”, maybe the administration, parents, and most especially, the students, can get back to a class where we’re actually more concerned with learning about a subject, rather than learning how to pass the subject on a test.