Tamar Lewin writes in the New York Times January 8, 2006, about Advance Placement Classes – students and parents believe AP classes are important preparation for college, colleges have mixed feelings about students who take AP classes.
“We’ve been put off for quite a while about the idea of teaching to the test, which is what a lot of A.P.’s are,” says Lynn Krahling, guidance director of the Queen Anne’s School in Upper Marlboro, Md. “We’re convinced, as an educational institution, that they’re not as valuable as what we could be offering on our own.
“But,” she says, “I think we’re going to stick with A.P.’s – purely out of fear. Parents are so terrified that if we drop our A.P.’s it would really affect college admissions that I think some of them would jump ship.”

EVERY summer, there is a fabulous moment at the Greensboro, N.C., “Cool to Be Smart” celebration, for students who have passed five or more Advanced Placement exams – the moment when one of them selects a lucky key and wins a new car and balloons cascade from the ceiling.
“I was so surprised when my key fit in the door that I just stood there for a couple seconds, and the balloons came down and everybody was clapping and cheering and my dad came screaming and yelling from the audience,” says Laura St. Cyr, last year’s winner, now a freshman at nearby Elon University.
In the last four years, the Guilford County School District has given away four cars, 20 laptop computers and 22 scholarships of $1,500 each – all in the service of coaxing students into more rigorous courses.
When Terry B. Grier became superintendent of the district, which serves more than 67,000 students, the two high schools with the most affluent students offered at least 15 Advanced Placement courses; the 12 others offered only a handful. So Dr. Grier decreed that every high school would have at least 15 A.P. courses, every student who took an A.P. class would be required to take the A.P. exam, paid for by the district, and every A.P. teacher would have special training. He cajoled local businesses to donate the prizes to create momentum for the program.
“Why should your ability to access a quality academic course be bound by where you live in our community, in our country?” says Dr. Grier. “A.P.’s are not for the elite, they’re for the prepared. And it’s our job to prepare these kids.”
His efforts have doubled the number of students taking A.P. courses, doubled the scholarship money they receive from colleges, and tripled the number of A.P. students who are black, in a district that is about half minority. Last year, 246 students qualified for “Cool to Be Smart,” and while Laura St. Cyr was the only one to get a Honda CRV, all of them were eligible for college credits that could save them on tuition. (Many universities award credit for courses when students score at least a 3 – out of 5 – on the exam.)
Tactics differ, but Mr. Grier’s commitment to the Advanced Placement program has become part of the gospel of improving education in hundreds of struggling urban and rural districts. Schools are doing all kinds of things to nudge students into A.P. classes, which are intended to mirror introductory college survey courses.
At some schools in Dallas, students get $100 for every test on which they score 3 or higher, thanks to a partnership with Texas Instruments; their teachers also get $100, in addition to $20 an hour for tutoring them. In New Jersey, Hackensack High School attracted 300 students to a new summer-school program to help hard-working students move into A.P. classes. Arkansas, Florida and South Carolina pay for all their students’ exams, which would otherwise cost $82 a shot. Minnesota will join the list this year.
The Advanced Placement program, administered by the College Board, began 50 years ago as a way to give a select few high school students a jump-start on college work. But in recent decades, it has morphed into something quite different – a mass program that reaches more than a million students each year and is used almost as much to impress college admissions officers and raise a school’s reputation as to get college credit. As the admissions race has hit warp speed, Advanced Placement has taken on new importance, and government officials, educators and the College Board itself have united behind a push to broaden access to A.P. courses as a matter of equity in education.
But at the very time that schools like those in Guilford County, Dallas and Hackensack are jumping on the A.P. bandwagon, many of the elite schools that pioneered A.P. are losing enthusiasm, looking for ways to cut their students loose from curriculums that can cram in too much material at the expense of conceptual understanding and from the pressure to amass as many A.P. grades on their transcripts as possible. A few have abolished A.P. programs altogether, and many have limited students to taking three a year, fearing burnout and bad scores.
It’s not that a large number of private schools shun A.P. courses – to the contrary, the number offering them rose 15 percent last year – but teachers and college counselors at many top-notch schools, public and private, confess to discomfort with the way the program seems to hijack the curriculum.
“We’ve been put off for quite a while about the idea of teaching to the test, which is what a lot of A.P.’s are,” says Lynn Krahling, guidance director of the Queen Anne’s School in Upper Marlboro, Md. “We’re convinced, as an educational institution, that they’re not as valuable as what we could be offering on our own.
“But,” she says, “I think we’re going to stick with A.P.’s – purely out of fear. Parents are so terrified that if we drop our A.P.’s it would really affect college admissions that I think some of them would jump ship.”
Sixty percent of American high schools now participate in the program, which offers courses in 35 subjects, from macroeconomics to music theory. Last year, 1.2 million students took 2.1 million A.P. exams, and the number of students taking A.P. courses has increased tenfold since 1980. Newsweek magazine has gone so far as to rank the nation’s best public high schools using the number of students who merely show up to take A.P. or International Baccalaureate tests as the sole criterion. (I.B. is another advanced curriculum, though far less common; Dr. Grier counts it for his “Cool to Be Smart” program.)
No wonder, then, that more than 3,000 students took seven or more A.P. exams last year. No wonder, either, that some students use the A.P. program tactically, knowing that their senior-year A.P. course listings will appear on their transcripts, and be counted in admissions decisions, long before they take the A.P. exam in May – if they ever do. (The A.P. brand is a curious one: students can take the exams, which run three hours, without taking the courses.) Part of the pressure to take A.P. classes also springs from the fact that most schools weigh A.P. grades more heavily than others – an A in A.P. is often worth five points, while a regular A is worth four – so savvy students know that A.P. courses can raise their G.P.A.’s, one of the most important elements in college admissions.
SO many more students are arriving at colleges with a slew of A.P. courses under their belts that some institutions have become more choosy about giving them credit. Harvard, for example, no longer gives credit for scores below 5. And A.P. classes have spread so widely that the College Board is concerned that some schools are putting the label on courses that offer a diluted curriculum. So starting next month, it will begin to audit the 15,000 high schools that offer A.P. classes to make sure students everywhere get the same quality of curriculum.
“It’s really important that we not give students in traditionally underserved schools a watered-down version of A.P.’s,” says Trevor Packer, director of the Advanced Placement program. “This is a massive outreach effort to help even the playing field.”
Despite its explosive growth, only 23 percent of last year’s public high school graduates had taken at least one A.P. class, he says, adding: “Among those who take A.P. exams, 1 in 10 students in urban schools score 3 or higher, compared to 6 in 10 in suburban schools.”
At many urban schools, superintendents, principals and teachers talk about how the Advanced Placement program exposes students to new subjects like economics and psychology. They say A.P. courses help identify opportunities for those who might otherwise not think of themselves as college material, and help solve discipline problems when bored students acting up in lower-level classes are put with higher achievers. Even students who score only a 2 on an exam, or never even take the exam, they say, benefit from having challenged themselves.
So while high-end schools are capping the number of A.P. classes a student can take, burnout is less a concern at schools where exposure to the curriculums is considered a virtue in itself.
“I’ve had students who made a 2 come back from college and tell me they did really well in freshman English because they’d been so well prepared by their A.P.,” says Michael Watkins, director of guidance at W. T. White High School in Dallas, which has the $100 bonuses for successful exam scores. “I used to work at a suburban high school, all Anglo, where they said no student could handle more than three A.P.’s. We have the opposite view here: They can take as many as they want. I had a student, from Vietnam, who took 20 A.P. exams. If they’re willing to do the work, our teachers will help them, tutoring before and after school and on weekends. We had one student who got 60 hours of college credit. That saves a lot of tuition money. And we’re very proud that our A.P. classes are racially mixed.”
One of the most troubling aspects of American education has long been an intractable achievement gap, with white students outpacing blacks in academic performance, a disparity reflected – and, many say, caused – by ability-grouping systems that cluster white students in honors classes and minorities at lower levels. At some racially mixed schools, a peek through classroom doors at skin color is a good indication of what level the class is. Advanced Placement classes have traditionally been viewed as part of the problem, but with an open-door policy, some educators say, they can be part of the solution.
In the last 10 years, the number of black students taking A.P. exams has tripled, to 68,000, and the number of Latino students has nearly quadrupled, to 151,000. While the percentage of Latinos taking the exam matches their percentage in the school population (about 13 percent), the percentage of blacks taking the exam, 5.5 percent, is only a third of the percentage of blacks in the high school population.
For all the excitement in struggling districts, though, it is unclear just how much taking an A.P. class does to raise academic achievement, particularly for students who never take the exam. Research shows that good scores on A.P. exams are strong predictors of college success. But last year, a study of University of California freshmen by two Berkeley professors found that the number of A.P. courses on students’ transcripts bore little or no relationship to their college performance. So, the authors suggested, selective colleges should reconsider their use of A.P. enrollment as a make-or-break criterion in admissions. Another study, in Texas, found that A.P. classes had no advantage over other kinds of college-prep classes in raising a student’s performance once in college.
In 2002, a committee of the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, sharply criticized A.P. math and science courses for cramming in too much material at the expense of understanding and failing to keep up with developments in the subjects. The College Board is now revamping its science and history courses.
ONE striking oddity of the Advanced Placement program today is that while many less-than-distinguished public high schools have open-door policies about who can enroll in A.P. courses, many academically superior schools still act as gatekeepers, allowing only top students to enroll. At many suburban and private schools, students must have good grades or a teacher recommendation or both. And at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, the two most competitive public high schools in New York, demand is so great that only students with the highest grades get into the popular A.P. classes.
Some of the most academically demanding private schools – among them, in New York, Brearley, Fieldston and Dalton – take a different approach: they do not offer Advanced Placement, although many of their students still take the exams.
“At Dalton, advanced classes aren’t called A.P.’s, but I think most of my grade took A.P. exams last spring,” says Nell Hawley, a senior who took three exams last spring and scored 5 on each. “But not having A.P. classes at Dalton means that you get to learn for the sake of learning, not taught to the test.”
At Friends Seminary, a small New York private school, A.P. biology was dropped recently in favor of a faculty-devised advanced biology course. The change was not a happy one for Audrey Reynolds, the director of college counseling. “It was much to my chagrin, since 85 to 90 percent of our students were getting a 4 or 5 on the A.P. bio exam, but our department thought the A.P. didn’t give the extensive lab work we think is necessary,” she says.
While it is the department’s job to make that decision, she says, her job is to make sure that colleges accept the new course on the same basis as the A.P. Schools typically send course descriptions along with transcripts so admissions officials can judge a student’s achievement level.
At Friends, for each student who takes the new advanced bio course, Ms. Reynolds adds a page-and-half attachment setting forth its track record with A.P. and the rigors of the new curriculum – and, she says, “referring to the National Academy of Sciences report that A.P. bio covered so much material that students spent the year racing through it rather than getting into depth.”
Two seniors at Friends, Eden Wall and Annie Perretta, say they have learned an enormous amount in their A.P. courses but wish there had been more room for discussion. Sometimes, they say, the pace can be overwhelming.
“In our physics A.P., we had a test where our whole class did badly, and we asked our teacher if we could slow down and review,” Eden says. “We love our physics teacher, and he understood, but he said we had so much material to get through before the break that there was no time for review. I think he was as frustrated as we were.”
Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, became critical of A.P. courses based on the experience of his daughter, Sara, who decided on Brown but has deferred enrollment.
“When Sara would go on her college tours, everywhere she went, they said, ‘We will be looking to see if you took every challenging course you could, and that’s how you will be judged,’ so of course she took as many as she could,” he says, adding that it seemed misguided for high school students to try to place out of classes they should be looking forward to taking in college.
“Even where the A.P. courses got the kids excited,” Mr. Weschler says, “the excitement would immediately be doused. In European history, the kids got very involved in the causes of World War I and wanted to talk about it, but the teacher said they couldn’t because they had to move on and cover all the material for the test. And in A.P. English, in the Pelham school system, the assignment for the poetry unit was to take a poem home at night and come up with two multiple-choice questions on it that could be on the test.”
Many counselors are troubled at the extent to which Advanced Placement has become a weapon in the college-admissions arsenal, especially when students forgo electives they might have preferred.
“On one hand, many of the classes are ambitious and wonderful, and I’m glad we have them,” says Scott White, a counselor at Montclair High School in New Jersey. “I also understand that colleges have no good way to consistently assess the highest level kids, and A.P.’s can provide an external paradigm for doing that. But from the student’s point of view, there is a horrific rise in the expectations on the part of colleges, almost a sense that if a student isn’t taking the highest level in every course, there’s something wrong. So we have students taking five A.P.’s, grinding away at all that memorization in a way that’s more appropriate to boot camp than to kids growing up.”
Some schools say there is now a sense that Advanced Placement classes have become inevitable.
“Part of it is that the College Board has done a very good job in marketing their products, working to increase access and enrollment, and the more students take the A.P.’s, the more they perpetuate the idea that students should take A.P.’s,” says Emmi Harward, director of college counseling at Hampton Roads Academy in Newport News, Va.
“Five years ago,” she says, “our English and history faculty developed some elective seminar-style courses for seniors, very rich college-level courses on the ethics of war and the power of myth. Even though the courses were very appealing, they felt like a risk to some students and parents who know there are colleges out there that just circle the number of A.P.’s on the transcript.”
WHEN all is said and done, how important are A.P. courses in college admissions?
That depends. Certainly, most schools count them in an applicant’s favor. One common approach is used at the State University of New York at Geneseo, where admissions officers tally the number of foreign language, math and science courses an applicant has taken, along with the number of A.P. or other advanced courses. Community college courses, often taken by advanced students in districts that lack an A.P. program, count, too, says Kristine Shay, director of undergraduate admissions, but “not exactly on the same basis, since they don’t have that known national curriculum.”
SUNY Binghamton takes a different tack. Admissions officers look at the grade point average and SAT scores, circle the number of A.P. and honors courses, consider what coursework was available at the high school and make a nonnumeric judgment: “All things being equal, if we had a kid with an 88 average and three A.P.’s, versus a kid with a 90 average and no A.P.’s, we’d probably take the one with the A.P.’s – but make it an 85 average and three A.P.’s and I’m stumped,” says Cheryl Brown, director of undergraduate admissions. She adds that almost 100 students arrived on campus this academic year with enough credits for sophomore standing.
Admissions officers at the most elite colleges say, in almost identical words, that they want students who have taken “the most rigorous program the school offers” (Marlyn McGrath Lewis, Harvard); “the most demanding program they can take at their high school” (Karl Furstenberg, Dartmouth); “courses that challenge them academically” (Jeffrey Brenzel, Yale); and “the most challenging program that’s available and that they can handle” (Richard Nesbitt, Williams).
“We don’t expect students to take every A.P. that’s offered, but if their school has 15 A.P.’s and they’ve avoided them all, that would certainly say something,” Mr. Nesbitt says.
While admissions officers acknowledge that taking the most difficult A.P. courses, like Calculus BC, indicates a strong academic background, they take pains to say that there is no magic, no numeric formula – and no penalty for students from schools that do not have an A.P. program.
“Sheer A.P. firepower, having 10 A.P.’s, doesn’t impress us,” says Mr. Brenzel. “It’s just one factor in evaluating a student’s background and preparation.”
NOT too long ago, Hackensack High School set its best students on an honors track that included few minorities, though two-thirds of the student body is black and Hispanic. But a summer tutoring program that began last year has helped ambitious students move into Advanced Placement and pre-A.P. classes, which are now inching closer to the school’s overall racial mix.
“I push it with all the parents, some of whom still think about A.P.’s as an elite thing,” says Mark Porto, the principal. “I had an African-American mother come in, upset that her son had been suspended. He’s a bright boy and I told her that what we really should be talking about was why he wasn’t taking any A.P.’s.”
In the A.P. American history class, Hackensack students read excerpts from J. P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, analyzing their tones for clues as to whom these leaders were trying to reach and whom they wanted to protect, while placing the writings in the broader social context of the emerging progressive and consumer movements.
Many in the class have always been among the school’s top performers, but others, like Theo Idigo, entered the A.P. world through the summer program, where the same teacher helped prepare him.
“I never thought about A.P.’s until my brother went away to college, and started telling me how I should take as many A.P.’s, as many difficult courses, as I could, because that would help me prepare for college,” he says, adding that he hopes to apply to Princeton, Temple and elsewhere. “Now I think they’re good.”
In an English literature A.P., Hackensack students work in small groups, as their teacher floats from table to table, asking questions: “Who’s speaking in this poem, and who’s he talking to?” she asks. “He’s a farmer, right? Is he an educated man? No. And what kind of imagery is he using? Right, animal imagery. And why? Because that’s what he knows. And what do you think is his attitude toward his wife?”
Slowly, the students tease out the story: this is an older farmer, married to a very young woman who remains scared and distant from him, and he longs for closeness. “They probably met online,” a student says.
Marc Paulo Guzman, Hackensack’s top-ranked senior, takes the literature class, along with A.P. biology and A.P. calculus.
“I wish there were more A.P.’s offered,” he says. “They’re fast-paced, and you learn a lot.” Marc, whose family emigrated from the Philippines in 1993, is applying to Princeton, Yale and Duke. “I’ve done a lot of research about college on the Internet,” he says, “and I know A.P.’s can help you get in.”
Tamar Lewin is an education reporter for The Times.
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company