Advanced Placement Psychology Review Very Much Alike Yet Completely Different

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Some years ago, I was invited to speak at a national convention of high-school teachers of Avant-garde Placement (AP) psychology courses. AP courses, every bit y'all probably know, are high-school courses supposedly run at a college level, for which students can in some cases get college credit. The invitation came because I'm author of a textbook for college introductory psychology courses.

In my lecture to the AP teachers, I described a method of teaching, which I call the idea method, that I had developed for my own college courses and had, years earlier, described in several publications (e.g. Gray, 1993, 1997) and at conferences on higher educational activity. The ground of the method is to view the course not as a ready of topics or information or units to get through but as a set of big ideas having to practise with the subject being taught and and then to center the class around a critical analysis of each idea. Students would read virtually the thought and evidence supporting and refuting information technology, hash out the evidence in form, and so write an essay critiquing the thought based on their ain enquiry and thinking. My goal was to make the course a truly intellectual adventure rather than another time-wasting trip of memorizing trivia for a test and then forgetting it.

The teachers listened politely to me, but I could tell by their expressions that they were at least a flake perplexed. Afterwards the talk a couple of them came up to me and said, essentially: "That was interesting, but there is no style we could use your method in our AP courses. The whole purpose of the course is to prepare students for the AP test provided by the College Board, and the just way students can pass that exam is to memorize lots of what you are calling trivia. We must cover an enormous amount of ground in the course, and if nosotros stopped to call up about and discuss ideas there is no manner we could brand it through. Students would fail the test."

More than recently, I happened to come up beyond some articles almost the Higher Board and its AP courses written past high-school students for their school newspapers. All of them were highly critical. Here are some titles (with links to the articles): Why everyone hates the College Lath; Restrict AP classes for our mental health!; Social force per unit area to take AP classes harms prospective students." This prompted me to expect more deeply into critical reviews of the courses and the tests. In what follows, I listing the 6 criticisms that I discover most compelling, along with a cursory elaboration on each.

1. AP courses are by and large cram courses, defective intellectual depth.

This criticism is, substantially, the i that I learned from those AP psychology teachers who attended my lecture. Information technology applies non only to AP psychology just, apparently, to near all the 38 AP courses and tests offered by the College Board.

John Tierney, who had taught college courses for 25 years before teaching some high school courses, elaborated on this in an article in The Atlantic a few years ago (Tierney, 2012). He claimed that AP courses, though pretending to be like college courses, were, in his words, "nothing like them." He wrote: "To me, the nearly serious count against Advanced Placement courses is that the AP curriculum leads to rigid stultification—a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and complimentary inquiry. The courses encompass too much material and do so too apace and superficially. In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual involvement. The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to dice."

I wish I could agree with Tierney that college courses are "aught like" AP courses. Unfortunately, a growing number of college courses are quite a bit like those AP courses—killers of intellectual curiosity. But that's a criticism of many college courses, not a defence force of AP courses. Still, it's fair to say that most college courses are far more thought-oriented than AP courses.

Here'due south a quote from another professor, Nicholas Tampio (2020): An AP course … is non like a college course. … As a higher professor, I write my ain syllabi, clear my own learning objectives, choose what to emphasize in whatever given semester, select reading materials and craft exams that cannot hands be graded on a rubric. …The AP program, on the contrary, requires teachers and students to follow a strict regimen that culminates in an online exam that can be as short every bit 50 minutes long. Form descriptions tell teachers and students what to do virtually every day of the school twelvemonth leading to the examination. … If high schools want to give students a taste of college, and so they should ignore AP courses and create courses that respect the judgment of teachers and students alike."

The point that I hold with is this. Higher courses, ideally and very often actually, are taught by people who are scholars in the field of the class. The students are privy, therefore, to the thinking of a person who has spent years immersed in the subject matter and is probably in some ways contributing to information technology. More than important than memorizing names and supposed facts, students are gaining insight into what information technology means to think similar a psychologist (or a political scientist, or biologist, or….). That is not happening in the typical loftier-school AP course.

2. Force per unit area to take AP courses is causing immense psychological damage.

This, I think, is the most serious criticism of the courses. Students feel pressured to take them, often many of them. The courses may lack intellectual content, but they are nevertheless very intense, time-consuming, stress-inducing. It all comes down to one exam at the end, and to have a chance of getting higher credit a educatee must get at least a 3 (on a 5-point calibration) on the test.

When the AP program starting time began, decades ago, the courses were relatively rare and only the most able students took them, simply now, in some schools, many quite average students feel pressured to take them. They believe they must, to accept a chance of access to the college they desire. They as well believe they will expect like losers, to their high-achieving classmates, if they don't have the courses. Some students have equally many as 12 or even 15 AP courses in their high-schoolhouse career, which leaves little time to think and hardly plenty time to exhale.

A few weeks ago, I posted an commodity documenting the extraordinarily high rates of feet, depression, and even suicide at high-achieving schools (here). Emphasis on AP courses is a big part of the reason for those high rates. This, besides, is the main complaint of students who have criticized the AP program. Here are the words of one loftier-school sophomore, writing for her school paper: "Information technology'due south evident that students are overloading themselves equally they believe taking more AP classes is the merely ticket to a selective school. The [upshot is] burnout, stress accumulating in our students, and less free fourth dimension every bit they overload themselves and their schedules. This constant overworking and pushing oneself to excessive amounts can eventually impact every attribute of students' lives, including emotional and physical well-being and even future college and career paths."

three. AP courses don't necessarily result in advanced placement or college credit.

The proper noun of the program, "Advanced Placement," implies that the courses will effect in "advanced placement" in college. But this is not necessarily true. Some colleges, every bit a matter of policy, practice not accept AP at all, and the number of such colleges appears to be growing (here). Some offer college credit if the AP test score is sufficiently high but practise not allow placement out of the supposedly equivalent higher course. In some colleges, it is up to the professor didactics the supposedly equivalent class to make up one's mind on advanced placement. That professor will quite likely wait at the syllabus for the AP course and say it does not resemble the course he or she teaches and is not adept preparation for the more advanced courses in the department. Moreover, many students themselves come to realize they would be missing out if they did not take the college course, so they choose to take it even if they would exist allowed to skip it.

Parents may push AP courses in the belief that they will reduce the number of semesters the student must spend in college and, therefore, full tuition cost. Only that rarely pans out. Rarely do colleges allow as much as a semester's worth of AP credit, no matter how many AP courses the student took and passed (hither).

4. At that place is little or no show that taking AP courses helps students perform well in college and diminishing evidence that information technology helps them get into higher.

AP courses are often touted as providing a rigorous academic experience that will help students succeed in higher. This was initially supported (superficially and falsely) by inquiry showing that, on average, students who had taken AP courses achieved higher GPAs in college and were more than likely to terminate in iv years than those that didn't. But a moment's thought will allow y'all to see the flaw in that argument. It'due south a archetype example of confusing correlation with causation.

Students who have AP courses are mostly those who performed well in all their high-schoolhouse courses, and students who perform well in high school likewise, no surprise, tend to perform well in college. They are, amid other things, highly motivated and willing to work hard. Researchers who have conducted the proper controls have shown that, when other things are equated, such as GPA in non-AP loftier-schoolhouse courses, those who have taken AP courses have no reward at all over those who take not (here).

Another belief is that taking AP courses will help students go into a selective college. This is probably to some caste truthful, but it depends on the higher and on many factors concerning the pupil's resumé. Moreover, every bit ever more students take AP classes, they become ever less valuable equally markers of distinction. In 2018, a group of private loftier schools in and around Washington, D.C., announced they were going to stop their AP program. Earlier making that determination, they surveyed 150 colleges to find out if this would hurt their graduates' potential for admission, and the survey assured them it would not (hither).

There are many better ways for high-school students to distinguish themselves academically than past taking AP courses. For case, they might conduct contained research, volunteer in a lab, write for their school newspaper or even their community weekly newspaper, or tutor students in lower-level courses. The time freed up by fugitive AP courses may provide opportunity for more than meaningful ways to find and pursue their interests and, incidentally, impress higher admissions officers. A portfolio of existent-world accomplishments is likely to impress admissions officers more a set of high marks in AP courses, especially at elite colleges where applicants with high AP marks are a dime a dozen.

5. AP courses weaken the balance of a high school's curriculum.

One of the compelling arguments for schools to cancel the AP plan is that information technology draws resources and prestige away from the rest of what the school has to offer. Instead of AP, schools might create their own special courses, which motivate through 18-carat interest rather than concern for status and attract a diverseness of students, non simply the class grubbers. I think teachers and students alike would much rather create their own courses, founded on their own questions and interests, than follow cookie-cutter curricula set out past the College Board.

6. AP courses enrich the executives who caput the Higher Lath.

The Higher Board is legally a nonprofit corporation, just it operates similar a for-profit corporation (here). Like for-profit corporations, it continuously strives to bring in more coin by expanding its client base and adding new fees wherever it tin get away with them. Its president makes over a meg dollars per year and its upper executives brand $300,000 to $500,000 a year in bacon and benefits (here). The College Board has been a failure as an aid to education, but a resounding success as a business.

The Lath actively lobbies to get schools to adopt its plan and lobbies state governments to provide financial back up to get more than schools and students into AP courses. Students in the program must pay $94 for each AP test taken—a fee that has risen continuously over the years. Considering some students, in the past, chose not to take the test later on they had already been accepted to a college, the Lath instituted a requirement that students must pay $40 upward front end, at the starting time of the class, and would forfeit that even if they chose later not to take the test (hither). At that place is no conceivable rationale for that requirement other than the Board's greed.

Between 2016 and 2019, the number of AP exams administered per year increased from 2.iii million to more 5 million (Tampio, 2020, and here). At $94 a popular, that'south a lot of money. Because there is no visitor competing with the College Board for the advanced-placement business concern, the Lath has a monopoly, and it operates as all monopolies practice, creating a sense that information technology is essential and extracting all it can from an ever-growing customer base of operations. Roughly half of the College Board'south income comes from AP testing and most of the remainder from its college admission test, the SAT, where it likewise has essentially a monopoly. (The Sabbatum racket is another story!)

And now, what do y'all think almost this? … This blog is, in part, a forum for give-and-take. Your questions, thoughts, stories, and opinions are treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the caste to which nosotros concord or disagree. Psychology Today no longer accepts comments on this site, but you can comment by going to my Facebook profile, where y'all will see a link to this post. If you don't see this post at the tiptop of my timeline, simply put the title of the post into the search choice (click on the iii-dot icon at the top of the timeline and and then on the search icon that appears in the menu) and it will come up. Past following me on Facebook yous can comment on all of my posts and see others' comments. The give-and-take is frequently very interesting.

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Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/202110/the-advanced-placement-racket

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