- Asserting that AP classes are not equivalent to classes where he went to school is unhelpful. Mr. Tierney fails to mention that he went to Yale, making this anecdote disingenuous at best.

- Colleges no longer accepting AP credit is hardly the fault of AP courses. This point is presented without evidence.

- Marginal students being allowed into AP courses falls squarely on the schools; this has nothing to do with the value of the exams

- We should be looking for ways to extend AP classes to minorities, not taking them away from everyone else because minorities do not have access.

- Is the "...mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry" mentioned by the author more likely in an AP class or in a freshman lecture with 400 students taught by an adjunct?

- The issues the author mentions w.r.t. the College Board have nothing to do with the value of the AP exam, but the author intentionally conflates these issues.

I did my first two at a community college. While I don't doubt that you can find some high school courses equivalent to or superior to their college analogues, this is not the prevailing reality.

But such positive outliers have little to nothing to do with the AP brand, and much more to do with the course's teacher. They certainly have nothing to do with AP testing for equivalency credit, which occurs after the fact. AP testing is a shoddy placement tool which frequently and provably tends to overstate students' preparedness for advanced studies.

In STEM fields, anyway. Freshmen distribution survey courses don't do much to prepare you for anything particular, even at Yale.

I actually found my humanities requirements the most useful of my intro courses, as a CS major, outside the actual CS courses themselves. The required physics and chem classes were intellectually interesting and perhaps useful for understanding the world, but I've never really used them in my work.

On the other hand, my philosophy classes taught me how to write long-form scholarly essays, which construct and refute arguments and cite the literature as appropriate. In my current career as a CS academic, that's a quite core part of my job, and is something I didn't learn at all from my STEM courses. I'm glad I wasn't able to test out of those, because we sure didn't learn how to do that in high school AP English!

Exactly. Since top tier universities know that in practice, most of their undergraduate intake will have taken AP classes, it no longer makes sense to give credit for them.

Of course not all programs are created or implemented at an equal level, but the author's single experience and unreferenced conjectures present poor arguments.

(Class of 2003 if that's relevant.)

I'd like to find more scams like that.

That class was the exception rather than the rule, but I'll never forget it even if I've forgotten most of what I learned there.

AP may have its flaws, but it has allowed me to get much more out of college than I would have been able to otherwise.

My example from 2001.

I took two AP classes: US History and Calculus.

When I was accepted to my university as a computer science major, I found out my Calculus credits would be converted to Business Calc, which was meaningless to a CS degree. My US History class would count as a 3 credit elective.

I took the History test, opted out of the Math test. It worked out well for me. I got the credits and had some experience in Calculus prior to taking it in college.

My only problem with the AP classes, is the teachers become pushers. They want you to take the test. Everyone takes the test. Why won't you take the test? I'm sure they are reviewed based upon their scores, but it has to be in my best interest.

Furthermore, these classes do look good on your college application. Just be smart about which tests to take.

Before proceeding, here is the list of tests I took:

Sophomore Year: Geography

Jr Year: Calculus BC, Micro & Macro Economics, Government, English Language

Sr Year: Computer Science AB, Physics C, Statistics, English Literature

I also had amazing teachers, many award winning including a NASA scientist and a former Defense Department programmer.

First, most of the best colleges limit the scores they are willing to accept in exchange for credit. When I attended college, 5s were required in major specific studies in order to receive credit at Texas A&M, which if I recall correctly was how it was at MIT, the Naval Academy and various others. A 5 on an AP exam in my opinion is par for a passing grade in a college course. When I started at Texas A&M as a Mathematic/CS dual major, I started in Calculus 3 and CS 211 (~3rd semester equivalent). Material-wise I was more than capable of handling the classes, and even found that my background had been far more rigorous than many of the other students.

The only problem AP courses caused for me were an issue of my advisor who allowed me to take 15 hrs of sophomore level courses my first semester as a Freshman including: Discrete Math, Cal 3, CS 211, Statistics 211 and Biology 101. In retrospect, this was a huge mistake. Emotionally, I was not prepared to handle the course-load and struggled. This was exacerbated by the fact that it had actually been a year since I'd taken any Calculus since I took the AP Cal BC exam my Jr year. I would have been much better off with the minimum course-load (12 hrs) and a few lighter classes. Unfortunately, due to my entire semester's worth of earned credits and a dual major, I had little to no "lighter" courses left to take in my degree plan.

All in all, to hear someone claiming AP exams are a "scam" is absurd and laughable to me. They saved me roughly $20,000 in in-state tuition & board at a public university! I expect the savings to someone attending a private university would be far more profound (on the order of $100k). If anything, the biggest problem with the AP system is that schools do not sufficiently equip students to either take the exams or made sufficiently aware of the benefit they offer.

However, I think AP exams are a "scam" in a sense. The scam isn't financial, but educational. You can undeniably save a lot of college tuition by passing AP exams, but that alone is not sufficient for truly understanding the material.

Because my school didn't have AP classes, I self-studied for 5 AP exams in my last year of high school (Calculus BC, Biology, Chemistry C, and both Physics C exams). I got a 5 for all exams, except Electromagnetism in which I got a 4. However, now, I can barely recall any of the content I crammed for, except for calculus for which I took more advanced courses in university, and I feel poorer educationally as a result.

The biggest problem with AP exams is that they're so easy to pass without truly internalizing all the concepts. The exams are graded on a bell curve, and if you look at the average scores, they are disturbingly low. Anyone who truly understand the course material should be able to pass these exams without difficulty, but the only conclusion I can make is that AP classes are pushing extremely unprepared students to take these exams, probably with the lofty goal of giving them a step up in university.

For my AP humanities courses (APUSH, WHAP, APEng III, IV, etc), I'd tend to agree with the author in that those courses were largely a hurried survey with lots of busy work and perhaps not on par with what I could have take at my uni. This concern was ancillary to me as I went into university knowing that I wanted to double major in physics and mathematics so being essentially exempt from my humanities core allowed me to take 18 upper division math courses and 19 upper division physics.

I guess my conclusion is that the AP programme is good when used with an ultimately end goal in mind and, in a lot of cases, provides near identical treatment of materials, especially in the hard sciences.

For many students, AP classes are a good thing. They provide to those capable of doing advanced work a chance to move ahead at a faster pace. The classes alleviate the boredom many students face during the high school years. For these students the classes are a positive. Any actual college credit received for the work done is a secondary benefit for this group.

Unfortunately the use of AP classes is being undermined by disreputable school administrations. Facing calls to provide a better education, these schools have used participation in AP classes as a metric to show improvement. To raise the participation rate the schools have lowered the admittance requirements. The effect, particularly in non-science and math courses, has been that the classes are slowed down and are of less benefit to those who the classes were originally purposed for.

My observations are based on being a parent of high school age children over the past ten years and talking with students about their frustration over having many AP classes regress to the typical class.

If you are reading this and are still in High School I recommend taking as many AP classes as you can. It looks great on your transcript and you can either validate college classes or get the easy A.

The students had a scam they seemed to like, however- take AP classes then retake the college course. Easy A.

When you take a high school class - any high school class - you are required to learn what the teacher wants you to learn the way s/he wants you to learn it. You're giving up "creativity and free inquiry" in both cases. Letting some random teacher rather than the AP board set the curriculum might be a good idea if you've got an unusually good teacher, but it would be a bad idea if you don't. (In fact, if you've got a teacher that good, maybe you should make his curriculum what the AP board test on so more students can benefit from it!)

Caveat: I only took STEM-type AP classes - math/physics/biology/compsci. No humanities.

I really do not like the CollegeBoard, especially how they have the monopoly on standardized testing. If you want to get into any respectable college you must go through them and take the SAT, or at least some AP courses. They really are a for-profit "non-profit" company, where they squeeze as much money from you as possible. Yes, grading tests takes money, but at $89/exam, it's cost prohibitive for those from low-income families.

However, in my college search over the past year or so, I haven't seen a college that doesn't accept at least some form of AP credit. I have talked to some students that, while helpful, an AP class doesn't replace an introductory course (computer science, for example).

At my school, about 80% of students take at least <em>one</em> AP class over their four years. So, at least for me, I haven't found that AP classes are smaller. They are in fact larger than lower level honors courses, sometimes much more so.

The point where I truly agree with Tierney is where he says the AP courses cover too much too quickly. I live in Connecticut, and we start school about a month later than schools in the south and southeast. However, everyone takes the tests at the same time. This puts us at a huge disadvantage—we have to learn the same material in a much shorter time frame. This also makes it so we can't do much that interests us as a class. For example, in European History we'd take the time to do mock trials, debates, discussions, etc., but we simply don't have the time for that before the AP exam. Of course, we have about a month of school after the AP exam where we can do whatever we'd like, but that doesn't help us take the test.

While I don't think students will stop taking AP classes in the future, it would certainly be nice to have an organization that cares about the student to administer them. The CollegeBoard really is not looking out for the student, but for themselves.

I agree with you about the dubiousness of the College Board's non-profit status, but the only test I or my parents had to pay for was the SAT. Of course, this was in 97-98, so maybe things have changed. I always viewed College Board as a means of extracting money from the schools, not the students.

> However, in my college search over the past year or so, I haven't seen a college that doesn't accept at least some form of AP credit.

The university I went to for my freshman year (Florida International University) flat out refused to let anyone skip English Lit, no matter how may tests you passed. I did, however, get credit for English Comp and Cal I.

I didn't have many AP options at my high school. I took four (Cal AB, both English, and French) and only could have taken two more (US History and Anatomy).

A friend of mine came in with AP computer science; during his campus visit the CS prof he met with basically said "if you test out of CS 111 I'll fail you in CS 122." My friend was astonished by the statement, but after taking CS 111 understood what he meant: the AP class was worth just a few weeks of the college class it was supposedly equivalent to.

AP classes probably vary as widely as high school and college classes, but it certainly throws another variable into the equation. If you lose the gamble, you wind up retaking whatever the next class in the sequence is plus the class you were testing out of, for a net loss compared to not doing any AP. If AP worked as advertised, that simply shouldn't happen.

The only difference was that college was even more automated and pointless. Everything was horrendously standardized, even the homework, which was graded by computer half the time, removing all possibility of partial credit.

No, if AP classes are a scam, it is only because the entire american educational system is a scam.

If anything, college itself is more of a scam than AP tests, and orders of magnitude more expensive ($89 for an AP test is peanuts). And, statistically speaking, I would be surprised if the author himself was anything better than a mediocre lecturer.

The battle is between two sides, one who believes teachers should just go in the classroom and teach what they think is best for the students, and the other side who believes teachers should follow a regimented curriculum to make sure students learn what they need to.

In a perfect world, where every teacher was amazing at helping students learn, the first option would be best. In the real world, teachers come in a variety of skill levels and we need some type of testing to make sure students are working hard and teachers are providing value.

Currently we (the US) solve this balance by allowing teachers to teach how they want but also testing kids every year in a standardized way. This is exactly how the AP test works and provides an important metric to understand how well students actually did. It is certainly not perfect, but is the best balance we can come up with at this point. My guess is that places like Khan Academy will serve as additional help as time goes on to increase student learning, and may even provide the opportunity for teachers to have more discretion in class while students learn more out of class.

As far as the rest of the arguments the author makes, it is clear the author did not teach in an average public college. AP classes were far more challenging in high school than anything my undergrad offered and many times better taught. My one regret was not filling my schedule with more AP classes.

I went to a big public university in the 90's. 75% of intro classes in topics covered by AP were large lectures where the professor only showed up for the first class, and attendance is graded and taken by swipe card. My high school didn't offer AP CS, so I got to sit through Computer Science 201. The class had 650 people in it, and was designed to weed out the folks who cannot grok linked lists. (CSI 301 had 150)

I took AP US History, got a 5 on the exam and received 6 credits covering History 101 and 102 -- had I not done that, I would have either spent two semesters listening to some grad student powerpoint about chapters in "The American Pageant" or skipped all of the interesting upper class History classes that I was interested in.

So if sitting in a lecture hall with 600 people encourages "creativity and free inquiry", I'm all for it. My experience suggests the opposite.

>AP courses are not, in fact, remotely equivalent to the college-level courses they are said to approximate.

vs.

> The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superficially.

Maybe this is a difference in philosophy about what the AP class should be - an in-depth seminar class as opposed to survey? My impression is that HS honors classes are usually seminar style, whereas AP classes, tests, and college credit (if available) is designed like a 101-level class. If that is correct, the survey format for AP seems logical: how could there be a national, standardized test for a seminar class? So AP serves a useful purpose. But if so, his former statement above makes no sense because the latter is a description of every college 101 class.

Students really have no other choice if they are college-bound.

We demand equal opportunity for minorities to get scammed!

I had a high school physics & chemistry teacher who didn't teach the advanced courses as AP courses, because physics/chemistry majors should take the courses at their university, and others didn't need it. I can see his point - I didn't NEED it, but the extra cheap credits would have been nice.

I liked my AP (and other advanced) courses, my son likes his now, and he's much more motivated in those courses than he has been in previous years (correlation/causation, etc.)

Outside of the "saving time/money in college" point, here's my take: most of high school's classes wasted a lot of my time. They moved very slow and were not challenging enough for me to bother engaging with them. At least the AP courses were more interesting and challenging, which meant I spent less time sitting around bored and more time actually learning things.

I think that was a pretty good value.

My experience may have been skewed by unusually good teachers, but making that kind of legitimate education available to high school students is anything but a scam.

Really? Everyone I know who participated did so primarily because a high enough score on the exam was likely to get them credit for some college course (that they then would not have to spend extra time and money to take).

So when I read a recent blog post by John Tierney, I was disappointed that he hadn’t demonstrated the same critical thinking skills we see so effectively deployed by AP students, who recognize that hyperbole and overstatement should be used sparingly, that intellectually honest arguments must be grounded in evidence, and that complex issues require careful thinking.

On behalf of the tens of thousands of AP teachers and students whose classroom experiences Mr. Tierney so unilaterally condemns, I’m writing to provide some evidence intended to describe a much more diverse set of AP experiences than Mr. Tierney allows.

Mr. Tierney says AP courses don’t "hold a candle" to the college course he taught. I have no data about the quality of the course he taught, so can only compare AP courses to the introductory college courses at institutions like Duke, Stanford, University of California,Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, and Yale, which are among dozens of institutions that each recently piloted AP Exam questions among its own students to confirm comparability of content, skills and rigor. In fact, 5,000 college professors from the nation’s leading colleges and universities participate annually in the review of every AP teacher’s course, the writing of each AP Exam question, and the scoring of the AP Exams. These professors consistently attest to the overall quality of AP teachers’ work and its comparability to the best outcomes of introductory college courses. These professors recognize that just as there is much variability among the thousands of instructors who teach introductory courses on college campuses, there is variability among AP teachers. And these professors express a wish that there were as much support for quality across the instructors of introductory college courses, many of whom are graduate students teaching their first courses, as there is for AP teachers, let alone a consistent external examination to serve as a reliable and valid measure of learning in such coursework. After castigating AP teachers, Mr. Tierney condemns AP students as well, claiming that "two thirds" of his own AP students did not belong in his course and "dragged down the course" for students who did "belong there." Again, I will not claim visibility into his own experience with his own students, but I can say that nationally, there has been a great victory among educators who have believed that a more diverse population could indeed succeed in AP courses. In 2012, AP scores were higher than they’d been since 2004, when one million fewer students were being given access. These outcomes are a powerful testament to educators’ belief that many more students were indeed ready and waiting for the sort of rigor that would prepare them for what they would encounter in college.

Despite educators having doubled the number of underrepresented minority students participating in AP over the past decade, we do share Mr. Tierney’s concern that "large percentages of minority students are essentially left out." Our data show that among African American, Hispanic and Native American students with a high degree of readiness for AP, only about half of these students are participating, often because their schools do not yet offer the AP course. We call for continued commitment to expanding the availability of AP courses among prepared and motivated students of all backgrounds.

This is not at all the same as claiming that all students, here and now, should be enrolled in AP courses. These are, indeed, college-level courses. The data show this irrefutably. But just as all American students are not yet prepared for college, all American students are not yet prepared for AP course work. We must be vigilant about fostering greater readiness for AP, and then we must care for students within AP courses by providing support, mentorship and encouragement.

This also includes investments in addressing the balance of the breadth and depth required by AP courses. We engage professors and teachers regularly in the review of AP course content, and we find that in most AP subjects, AP teachers and students have significant flexibility to tailor the AP requirements to topics and issues of deep personal interest, while developing a rich understanding of the key concepts and skills in each discipline. But in science and history, two subject areas that, by their very nature, expand the amount of possible content with every passing day and new discovery, we have recognized a need to implement a significant redesign effort that frees teachers and students from the pressure to cover superficially all possible topics. This redesign has been embraced by higher and secondary education alike as the new "gold standard" in introductory college science and history curricula.

Finally, Mr. Tierney’s financial claims are inaccurate. Contrary to Mr. Tierney’s statement, schools do not pay to offer AP courses. Instead, the not-for-profit College Board incurs the costs to register a school to offer AP courses and to authorize each locally developed AP syllabus, and we subsidize teacher professional development for schools unable to afford to send a teacher to one of the dozens of U.S. universities that train new AP teachers each summer. The AP Exams themselves are optional (80 percent of students opt to take them), and we cover all of our operating costs (developing, printing, shipping, scoring the exams) with the $89 exam fee, which is less than the cost of a typical college textbook, let alone the credit hours for that college course. For students unable to afford the $89 fee, the College Board partners with federal and state and local agencies to reduce the fee (historically to $0-5 per exam). After paying for our expenses with the exam fees, decisions about the use of any remaining funds are decided by our Board of Trustees, which is composed of educators from colleges, universities and secondary schools. Unlike a for-profit entity, where profits privately benefit investors, the College Board is obligated to reinvest remaining funds in educational programs, specifically because it is a not-for-profit organization. The College Board Trustees ensure these funds are used to improve educational opportunity and quality for a diversity of students. This year, they have approved the use of such funds to provide, for example, scholarships to teachers; increased subsidies to low-income students; creation of online score reports for AP students; and online learning supports for students.

The AP Program is not a silver bullet. It is not a simple cure for all challenges we face within our education systems. But as educators use AP standards to help a diversity of students engage in rigorous work worth doing, I find myself inspired daily by what they are achieving.

Trevor Packer Senior Vice President, Advanced Placement and SpringBoard Programs The College Board