In today's day and age there is so much emphasis on taking as many Advanced Placement classes as possible. But should schools draw the line, and where should that line be? This AP teacher tries to find a middle ground.
When I was in high school, I took most of the honors-level classes available to me, although being fully aware of my limitations in math and science I tended to stay away from anything too hard in those disciplines. I took one AP class - AP U.S. History. I made an A in that class, and I got a 4 (out of 5) on the College Board's exam, which meant I got six hours of college credit. With my one AP class and a few extracurriculars, I scored a full ride to college.
I graduated high school in 2001. What a difference nine years makes.
I now teach AP U.S. History at a suburban high school right outside Charlotte with an enrollment of about 1600 students in grades 9-12. This semester, I have 76 students enrolled in APUSH (pronounced by the cool kids as "A-push"). My previous four years teaching AP, I had enrollments of 30, 48, 43, and 23. At first I was at a loss to explain why I had so many kids, but after thinking about it and talking it over with some colleagues, I came up with a few theories. A majority of the kids that signed up for APUSH are kids that I have previously taught in other courses, so they may have signed up just because they liked me. It's really no secret that AP classes tend to be teacher-driven and students will try very hard to get into a class where they feel like the teacher is good (or, in some cases, easy). I think the largest factor, however, is the pressure that kids are under to take as many advanced classes as they possibly can.
A few weeks ago the AP teachers at our school arranged a meeting with our administration and guidance counselors to have a discussion about how students are steered into our classes. I found out that things work considerably differently from when I was a student.
I attended high school in the same county where I teach, and we had a registration system that was set up in a way that required a teacher to recommend you for honors- and AP-level classes. If the teacher didn't recommend you for the course and you still really wanted to take it, your parent could sign a waiver saying that they understood that the school didn't agree with this choice of course and that the student had every right to fail if they couldn't pass muster.
In this day and age, students can sign up for any course they want without any kind of recommendation. Each student has a guidance appointment where their guidance counselors can give them advice, but if a kid wants to take a class, there's not much the counselors can do to stop them.
Increasingly, the guidance counselors told us in our meeting, students are signing up for as many AP classes as possible just to keep up their class ranks and grade point averages and impress college admissions and scholarship committees. One counselor's case-in-point was the University of North Carolina, the sexy school choice for a lot of our stronger students. Carolina, she said, wants to see their applicants take at least SIX AP classes in high school. Even the less selective schools around us want to see a minimum of two or three AP classes on the transcript. Parents know this, too; they come in and demand that their child be allowed into AP this and AP that, and the teachers and counselors can't do a damn thing about it.
As a result of this pressure from universities, it has been my experience and observation that these two things are happening with alarming frequency: 1) students are taking AP classes that they have absolutely no business taking due to busy schedules, lack of preparedness, etc., or 2) students are taking too many AP classes at one time.
Every year about two months before APUSH begins, I send out what I call my "fear-of-God letter." It's a letter that explains what the course expectations are - there will be one to two hours of homework per night, there will be frequent reading quizzes, and we will move at a break-neck pace to get through everything before the exam in early May. It's candid, but doesn't over-exaggerate. Every year, the letter has convinced several weaker or overwhelmed students to reconsider. This year, after I sent out the letter, my enrollment increased by one. What they're hearing from colleges must outweigh anything I can say to them.
I do not wish to sound like one of those teachers who only wants the brilliant kids in his class so his test scores can look good. I am more than happy to teach any student who wants to take APUSH that is willing to participate in the class and put in the work, and I tell my students every year that my only goal for them is to learn some history and to have some fun doing it. But when I graded the first unit test earlier this week, I was not surprised about the results: out of 76 students, 11 made A's, and 25 failed. Dumbing down the course may help out that depressing statistic, but that's not fair to the stronger students in the class who want and need the challenge that they desired when they signed up for the course. I genuinely feel for the ones who come to me in tears because their parents are going to be mad at them for the 55 they just got on a test, or they're working their tails off and just can't figure out how to write a free response essay, but a part of me that I'm not particularly proud of just wants to shake them and cry, "Did you not see this coming? I tried to warn you! Why are you doing this to yourself???"
So what can schools do? Schools nowadays are judged by a lot of educational experts, parents, and publications on how many of their students take advanced classes. But is it really what's best for the students? Even the most brilliant and motivated of all students does not need to be taking four AP classes in a four-period schedule. Wouldn't colleges be more impressed by a student who took two or three AP classes and got 5's on the exams and A's in the classes, rather than a student who took seven AP classes but only passed four of the exams and failed one of the courses? Should we require teacher recommendation to get into AP classes? By the same token, are we crippling students' college chances by doing that?
All of those questions were asked and haggled over at length in that meeting between the counselors and the AP teachers. And it's probably no surprise to you that no one in the room had any clean-cut answers. Everyone knows it's a thorny issue, but no one knows how to approach it. In the meantime, we teachers march on, doing the best we can to prepare the students and give them a memorable experience, even if we know that experience may not be the best thing for them.