A couple of weeks ago, I posted a quick link to an article in the New York Times that reported that Darmouth College had stopped accepting the credits for high school AP classes. I added a quick "good," after the link. A friend has been grilling me about my reaction to the article, and we've had an interesting back and forth about the benefits of AP classes. I thought I would open up the debate on the blog.
I have no direct experience with AP classes. My kids are too young for them, and my high school only offerred AP Biology when I was in school. My reaction came from the perspective of a former college professor.
I am skeptical whether a high school class would have the same rigor and expectations of a college class. Elite high schools might provide the equivilent of a college class, but there is too much variation in high schools across the country. I also thought that these classes did not benefit the student, who would skip necessary introductory classes in college and be unprepared for the requirements of upper level college classes.
My friend thought that AP classes helped students control college costs. His own experiences with AP classes were very positive, and he felt that they were the equivilent of an introductory college class.
Curious what the Apt. 11D gang thinks about this.
Apt. 11d 
I teach at a community college, and I teach philosophy — so my data set is limited.
That being said, when a student tells me they have AP English credit, so they don’t have to take Comp I, I notice that their papers suck — not the worst on the pile, but they are significantly less well-written than the students who took Comp 1.
What’s worse is that these are the students who are more likely to challenge loss of points for form/grammar etc.. because, they got AP credit — so, of course I’m wrong and their vague memory of AP English is right..
I suspect the problem is with the exam, as there is very little chance that the exam assesses several papers etc..
I also suspect that the reason elite colleges are looking more closely is that enrollment in disciplines that give AP credit is decreasing — and folks want to keep those sections… but, that may just be me.
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The thing I have liked about AP classes was that the exit exam is standardized so everyone who takes the courses (no matter where) are evaluated by the same criteria. When I was more familiar with AP courses, each college could set a standard for what scores would be accepted for credit. I know that many colleges only accepted 4’s or 5’s for college credit. High schools could award high school credit as they felt fit but the colleges decide what to accept as college credits. It seemed a good system to me. If you can get the score you learned as much as taking the course at a college.
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Graduated from high school in 1988, took (and received college credit) for both AP Eurpoean History and AP Government. I only took honors American History, so had to repeat the introduction American History class at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio.)
In my experience, there my high school AP classes were no less rigorous than my introductory college level classes. In fact, the honors American History class I took was basically on par with the college introduction class. AP = 100 level classes.
200 level and above, not even close.
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I took 7 AP exams, and got “credit” for four of them, but credit was basically meaningless. The one course that I took without taking the corresponding AP exam ended up helping me the most: I just told the department I wanted to skip the intro level class and they let me. In my mind, AP exams are most useful for motivting kids about college, but do very little once they arrive.
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There’s a long and informed discussion here:
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2013/01/dartmouth-strikes-blow-against-ap.html
Some notes:
1. I had a very good AP experience at my generally mediocre high school and got two 4s. It was the best academic experience of my high school career, aside from a very good high school chemistry class. AP is helpful for ensuring quality control for high school classes. Without AP and the reality check provided by failing the test, a lot of high school courses would be worse than they are today.
2. In her post, Catherine Johnson says that her husband (a history professor) was also initially hostile to AP courses, until he discovered that AP is very content-rich compared to the usual fare at US high schools.
3. I can fully believe that some AP courses are unsatisfactory and don’t match up with college requirements.
4. AP is directed at passing a test. Hence, in my experience, there’s little out-of-class writing (but a good deal of in-class writing to simulate test conditions).
5. I think the document based questions we did in AP US history were really superb for encouraging activation of background knowledge and analysis of primary materials. I’m not sure that you’d get anything as good in a normal college class, especially not with such a moderate class size.
6. In our current environment (especially in places like California), it’s very important for students to pick up all the credit they can where they can before hitting college. It can take a long time to collect the right courses in places like California where the courses simply aren’t being offered. Even at a private school like USC, my AP and Russian correspondence credit allowed me to do a double major in exactly four years, which was important. (I had to take an on-campus test for the Russian and placed directly into second semester.) I also placed out of the college math requirement, which was nice. The more requirements that you can get out of the way before hitting campus, the better.
7. Writing is so generally important that everybody should have to take a writing-heavy course in college (but not necessarily Comp 101).
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I took the five AP courses my high school offered at the time and scored well enough on all five exams to earn college credit, about a semester’s worth, at the university I attended. This made it easier for me to complete an extended minor, as well as spend my summers working instead of taking courses, as many of my classmates did. My experiences were overall positive, and my only regret is that placing out of the foreign language requirement for graduation effectively cut short my formal studies of language, and I wish now that I had kept studying Spanish formally (but then, I also think foreign language requirements should be beefed up at the university level).
I know plenty of teachers who feel hamstrung by the necessity to teach to the AP test, and if I were choosing, the IB program seems like a more rigorous, richer experience.
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At my very non-elite college I notice only the students with a 5 on the AP chemistryexam have even a chance at being ready to skip general chemistry and go straight to organic chemistry. It really isn’t pretty when most students try. Does a D on the transcript of an unprepared (but confident) student really benifit anyone? These are students with med school dreams too!
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My kids’ experiences — mostly good. I think for my daughter, going in with AP credits equivalent to first year meant that she could double major and still finish in 4 years. Would have been ridiculous for her to do the math and econ over again.
For my son, since he hasn’t started college yet, and we’ll see what a year’s worth of credit does him, I can only say that when he had the option of turning in a graded essay for a college application, he didn’t have one. That, in spite of taking both AP Lang and Lit, no, he hadn’t written an essay in 11th or 12th grade. So yes, I agree with Patty, in English they are coming unprepared for college level work.
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I got a 3 on the AP English exam and I have a PhD in English now. I got 4s in everything else (Calc, Bio, AmHist and EurHist). I think I got credit for 1 semester of calc. On my first exam in the calc I did take, I aced it with a 96. I pretty much failed everything afterwards and ended up with a C. My takeaway from that is that my HS actually did a pretty good job of doing college level calc; the first exam in the second term of college calc was equivalent to stuff I’d done in HS. In my first semester at college I barely went to my calc class, so it was no wonder I failed almost everything else. I might also have received credit for bio lecture but still had to take a lab course, which I remember quite fondly my second semester, trudging up Libe Slope at 7 am every Tuesday morning. That winter, it must have snowed every single Monday overnight. Oh, good times.
Writing is a skill that needs to be practiced. Even if AP English tests writing skills (or does it test reading comprehension? I forget), a student could very well be weaker by the time he or she gets to college. I don’t really support students testing out of English classes. At Cornell back in the 80s, you didn’t test out of a first-year writing class, but you could test into a higher level class.
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The AP English tests (both) have an essay section, and at my current school, our students still write as many prepared essays as the “regular” students, but they also practice timed writing more often.
I tested out of Eng 100 as a result of my AP scores, but was still required to take the “honors” level comp class, and it was a wonderful class; I suspect I would have been bored stiff in the class I tested out of.
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“I suspect I would have been bored stiff in the class I tested out of.”
I actually wasn’t bored, but my college had a freshman seminar program, so I took my writing courses in history and … man, I forget what the second one was on. It was English-based, though. I wrote an essay on Harlequin Romances.
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The equivalency idea works only when there is a tight fit between AP courses and strongly sequential college curricula and where the sequences are synchronized. At highly selective privates and the top public R1s, that is not very often. Either the sequences are built very differently or there’s no sequence for the AP to anticipate. For example, I’m sure history majors at Swarthmore who did well in good-quality AP European or American history classes are in some sense better prepared to take history courses. But there is no class at Swarthmore for which those classes *substitute*, nor is there a sequence where having taken those classes lets you skip something and move on to a more ‘advanced’ course–which is often how our students think it’s supposed to work and how AP credit was often sold to them by their high schools.
So AP I think really functions just as one more identifying credential of competitive ability in college applications–but it has a ‘business model’ that involves telling students they’ll be able to ‘skip’ content and be ‘advanced’, which is frequently not true, or often contributes to academic struggles when it is allowed. The only thing it generally gets you at a selective private or top R1 is a bit of wiggle room about having enough credits for graduation that you can comfortably go abroad, take an internship, have a light semester or withdraw from a bad class or two without worrying about being credit-shy. I’d just as soon find a way to allow for that flexibility without having to use the clumsy mechanism of AP credits with their misleading marketing.
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I worked with students who qualified for admission to our 4 year public university’s honors program. When our chemistry department had students who wanted to skip gen chem with a 3 or 4 on their AP, the chair would ask them to come to the department to take the final exam administered to gen chem students who had taken the course at the university level. If they passed it, they could skip gen chem.
There were many who passed it, but then would elect to take gen chem anyway as the final exam was an eye opener as to their preparedness for organic.
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I taught AP US History. I had to attend a class to be trained in teaching it. The breadth of coverage astounded me at the time, since I was used to years of the “regular” US curriculum. My students faced a substantial amount of homework. They were writing essays, memorizing piles of dates and names and even commented, “My first-year friends in college don’t do this much work in their history classes!” I’m pretty sure that had been my experience as well.
When I was in hs, I took Calculus, and I’m glad I did because my first year of college math was taught by an instructor who was very hard to understand. I just relied on my previous knowledge, (which had earned me a 3 on the AP test), and earned an A in the class.
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I graduated from high school in 2000, took 5 AP exams (4 as a senior, 1 as a junior) received a 5 or 4 on all, and was given 18 college credits at my small private college. It was utterly awesome, and helped me finish a double major B.A. plus a minor and the honors requirements in 3 years — an enormous time and cost advantage. I was a married college graduate and entering the adult workforce while most of my peers were toddling through their junior year. And yes, I do believe the high school AP courses were as rigorous as introductory college classes.
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Some of what I’ve read here and elsewhere suggests that AP is fine for getting required courses out of the way, but that it’s safer to repeat the course work at the college level if that’s going to be your major area of specialization.
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There is something very subversive about AP classes. If it possible for teachers with an MA to teach a college level class, why do we need tenured PhDs teaching college classes?
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Also, let’s be honest about what a lot of those intro level college classes look like–100-200 students in a class, little writing, little opportunity for discussion or class participation, and machine-graded multiple choice tests. A good high school class of 20 or 30 kids can beat that six ways to Sunday.
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And let’s not forget that the AP class will have twice the contact hours of the college level class. (On the other hand, the high school students will be spread thinner and have less time for outside study, since they are in school all day and have extracurriculars afterward.)
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I enjoyed my AP classes in the late eighties because they were more interesting classes. I didn’t even take the APs afterwards as I had no plans to skip college classes–and it turned out my college wouldn’t take them without additional tests anyway, which was okay for me because I didn’t care about getting credit that much. It wasn’t a problem to graduate from my college in 4 years, and I wouldn’t have wanted to graduate in 1/2 year ahead of everyone else. Back then. Now I can see it would have saved my parents money, and I did only have to take two classes my second semester senior year.
My daughter could have taken 2 AP classes this year, which is her freshman year. I think that’s a little crazy for a 14 year old. She only took one. She has been very stressed in it, but her grades have been excellent. I don’t regret her taking it, even though I actually had no particular plan to apply for college credits. I guess I’m assuming she will also go to the sort of school where you graduate in 4 years, and she won’t want to leave after 3 1/2. But I guess it would be good to have a buffer if she changes majors, so we’ll apply for what we can get.
My husband has frequently taught AP Calculus (he’s not doing it this year), and I was under the impression that students who received 5s in that were well prepared to move on in math. That is a sequence that is pretty well defined everywhere, and credits were definitely accepted at my college for them. I hung out with all the physics majors and I can assure you not a one of them took calculus when they arrived.
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My kids go to a high school that pushes, pushes AP classes. They are nationally ranked because of it. Both my daughters have now said that their college courses were less challenging than their AP courses in high school.
They also said the best writing they did was with their 8th grade English teacher.
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We don’t need tenured PhD’s teaching 100 level classes. At big universities those are largely outsourced to grad students or adjuncts who probably have far less teaching experience than an high school AP teacher. BTW, my AP US History teacher was a PhD and my AP European History teacher had a JD as well as an MA.
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“If it possible for teachers with an MA to teach a college level class, why do we need tenured PhDs teaching college classes?”
Well, these are intro courses. Could someone with a masters in English teach a senior level course on Early American Literature? Maybe not.
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To add what MrsEwer and Wendy said, note that those college intro classes are often taught by the people at the bottom of the college pecking order, while AP classes are usually taught by those at the top of the high school pecking order.
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In response to Timothy above: doesn’t Swarthmore take transfer credit for history courses that are not directly equivalent to courses you offer? If so, and the high school courses are of similar (or even better) quality, why not accept APs?
It probably doesn’t matter when most students are able to graduate in 4 years, as they do at most elite colleges and universities. That’s my guess. But I know that in the publics we are being pressured to accept not only any course offered at any accredited institution for credit towards graduation, but also credit for prior learning experience which does not even involve coursework. How can we then not accept high school courses, many of which, like my husband’s, are taught by faculty who have PhDs and taught college or would be teaching college if the market were better? (my daughter’s English teacher this year DOES adjunct, and told us on parent’s night how much better the students at the high school were). What’s the relevant difference? (BTW, there’s no doubt my college accepts AP credit, just not many students that have any to offer, though they could really, really use them).
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Good question! Another reason to be somewhat skeptical of claims made by colleges defending the position of never accepting AP credit, ever.
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In 1978-79 I was a high school senior taking my fourth year of French (and English). While the classes were not officially AP classes, both teachers encouraged me to take the AP exams. I got a 3 in French and a 5 in English. The state college I went to put me in second-year French (appropriately, as I was just challenged enough in that class) and gave me an entire year of English credit (and I could skip the basic composition and argument classes).
I was an avid reader and a good first-draft writer, with almost no editing skills. (I used to brag that I never rewrote, just turned in my first drafts of essays and reports.) I would have benefited from direct instruction editing your work to improve your writing, and I didn’t get it until 30 years later when I took a writing class at the community college.
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I would take care in making generalizations about adjuncts/graduate faculty are teaching 100 level courses. I’m a faculty member at a public university in the northeast, and a lot of line faculty teach feeder courses, because it’s likely that the department will generate more majors. That said, while I was an adjunct at other universities this was not untrue.
The quality of education is variable, and while the AP exam certainly gives students a chance to “take other courses” the amount a student learns in a high school setting versus a college setting is likely to be highly variable.
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I don’t have a problem with APs because of the variation. I actually think taking a 101 class with 25 kids and a motivated high school teacher is better than 300 kids in a lecture hall.
But I think this is an individual school issue. Dartmouth is saying: you need to stay all 4 years. Fine. Give the kids enough money to do that!
i’m surprised you are against it Laura, as its a way for some students to save money.
I loved my AP classes and would have been SO BORED in high school without them. I started taking them in 10th grade (History) and they were great. I am pretty sure AP biology was harder than the bio class I actually took in college (because I had to). (it was biology for non-majors)
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I have never taken an AP course in my life, and as a university professor I have honestly never thought about them (my university, like many, is stingy in accepting AP credits). But now I have a daughter who is a sophomore in high school and taking her first AP course (European History). And I have decided that the entire AP system is a scam.
Is it equivalent to a university course? In workload, maybe. The students sure do spend a lot of time studying, and taking tests and quizzes. And what they cover may be equivalent as well. But it’s how they cover it, and what students learn, that makes all the difference. In the AP course, they learn how to take a multiple choice test. In which they might be asked, for example, to identify which of four names was associated with new developments in perspective. They may successfully memorize the answer (Giotto). Will they know what a Giotto painting looks like? No. Will they know why that development is important? No. They may not even realize that Giotto is a painter or that he is Italian. These courses address exactly one type of learning style only, involve no writing or research, and do not make room for discussions or questions or interpretations or debates. The textbook itself is not bad, but it’s all they have: the students don’t read or engage with any primary texts or documents. They just read synthesis and then try to memorize details. This is just not the equivalent of a college-level course in European history.
What this course does is prepare students to take the AP multiple choice exam, which is, by the way, not cheap. And yet students and their parents are led to believe that this expense will actually save them money (if you get enough of these, they say, you can even graduate early). But a large number of universities accept no AP credits at all, and most are quite limited in what they accept. I would love to see some statistics comparing the number of AP exams administered every year to the number of course credits actually earned by those students (who both scored high enough and went to institutions that accepted those scores in exchange for a college course). I also want to know where all the money from those exam fees ends up.
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My daughter has to answer all kinds of “document based questions,” which, as I said in the other thread, I never heard of before (In my AP European class in the eighties, we read primary source materials, but I don’t think we were prepped for the actual exam at all–the teacher just taught it as an Honors class). I haven’t looked at examples, so I don’t know what they’re like, but they do involve primary source docs and images and the like I believe.
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Also, college courses vary a lot too. There are many college courses that do use texts where primary source docs would be more ideal. Just not the elite colleges. Do you think community colleges teach lots of primary source docs in 100 level classes? Why are there so many philosophy textbooks then? (Admittedly, they almost always have primary source excerpts in them).
One of the problems in these sorts of discussions is that there really are two very different types of college education in this country. It’s important that we don’t conflate the two. The issues/solutions to problems for the one type do not necessarily apply to the issues/solutions for the other type. There are also different types of high school. Then there are the overlaps–high schools classes that are better than colleges classes at the low end or even in the middle, not because of the college faculty, which are good pretty much everywhere, but because of the students and where they are and what they can do.
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I haven’t read all the comments yet, but wanted to note that a) my school eliminated AP courses this year and replaced them with courses that sound much like the courses one takes in college; and b) many schools like mine (independent and academically challenging) are following suit. Our college counselor told me today that the College Board actually has studied the outcomes for students in college if they skip a course because of a 5 on the AP test. They do not do well.
Going back to read the comments . . . may add more.
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Re: the level of training for teachers teaching AP. Here, we have several teachers with Ph.D’s and they tended to be the ones teaching AP. The same is true at my son’s public school. He’s in BC calc right now and his teacher has his doctorate.
I agree with curiousmonolith above. It generally teaches the wrong skill set. Most of the tests focus on content, not critical thinking or making an argument, etc.
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Laura–my husband teaches at a school in the interac, or whatever you call it, as I believe you do. Now that I think about it, he doesn’t teach the AP course anymore partly because they got rid of it. I forgot about that. I still doubt the best math students repeat calculus; they just don’t ask for college credit for it.
I would say that he used to teach at a different private school in New Jersey and there were many immigrant families in that school that used APs to save college money. They weren’t rich and saved for their students to go to private school in part I believe to save money on college.
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Taking the AP calc and bio courses meant I still went to class with all my honors friends in HS, and I had to take less of that math/science crap in college, so I am for it.
I have always wondered about that 3 in English, though. My writing skills are excellent and always have been, and my memory is very good, so maybe what happened is that I was reading the questions in ways that the readers didn’t anticipate. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing. 🙂 Wouldn’t it be cool if you could go back and read your AP exams?
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Watching my daughter, who is now a college first year, take AP American and AP World History in high school was depressing. As curiousmonolith suggests above, these courses, oriented to the standardized tests, do not teach a person how to think historically. Rather, even with the document-based questions, they crush the life, and most of the interesting stuff, out of historical learning. It’s a shame. And a scam. Warning to parents who have not yet experienced the College Board leviathan: give them only minimal information (name, address, etc.); otherwise your child will be reduced to a commodified educational product bought and sold by College Board and the Educational-Industrial complex (OK that sounds a bit too Chomsky-conspiratorial, but there’s truth there!).
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This is my haunted by high school moment: I only got a 3 on the AP English exam, even though I went on to major in English, work at a newspaper, and write as a professional today. I even read David Foster Wallace. Maybe it was the penmanship (horrible). Maybe it was the grading (erratic). Maybe I just was not that good then (likely).
Anyway, there was no credit for my 3s and 4s (3 total), but I picked up credit for my 5 in AP Computer Science.
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I took 3 AP exams (two 5’s and a 4) and 2 more (nominally) AP courses (for which I did not take the exams. My HS did not offer AP courses, per se, but students were encouraged to take the AP Biology, American History, 4th year of a language, and Calculus exams after the course, if they felt prepared. AP English was offered, because at the time, the AP exam consisted of poetry analysis, which was not generally covered in the curriculum.
My UG institution did not accept AP exams for any credit whatsoever. Given that we covered the entire HS year’s calculus class in a month, it was a completely valid decision. None of the science I covered in HS was covered at all in the UG curriculum. The UG institution also required a “humanities” course every quarter; the point of the course was to provide balance. I think the argument was that they expected you to take the AP level course but the curriculum level was going to be higher than that, even in introductory courses. In general, I’d say it was, even in the humanities courses. My AP level preparation in those courses probably allowed me to take those classes for a grade (you were permitted to take one elective class pass-fail, and less prepared students would use that dispensation on humanities classes).
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My HS didn’t call their classes AP because they didn’t want the curricular demands set by the test. It was up to the student to decide whether they were prepared after taking the class. A minor amount of test prep was included in the class (maybe write a few AP style paragraphs, . . . ) but otherwise, they were just rigorous courses.
I like AP tests as a standardized test of knowledge, but only when they’re not taught to (With the exception, potentially, of calculus, where teaching to the test might be a fine way of teaching calculus and maybe for foreign language as well). Don’t know for the proliferation of other tests, which include statistics, and CS, and geography these days.
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” Wouldn’t it be cool if you could go back and read your AP exams?”
I still remember the “essay question” on the Biology exam, on the physiological function of the kidney. I had a transcendental moment of understanding the glory of the universe while writing the story of the kidney ion exchange system.
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PS: “AP tests and classes should be ‘banned'” is my kiddos debate topic for the next debate. Kiddo’s going to have fun reading this thread.
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Of course, at many (most?) universities these days, many of the introductory courses these AP classes replace are huge and have all multiple choice assessment too. I got a semester’s worth of credits and it gave me a huge amount of freedom. To the extent these tests allow students to skip the 100, 200+ classes at many state schools like mine, I’m not sure much is being lost.
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I don’t know about AP, but I have an IB Diploma, and I found the IB program very rigorous, and on par with college level courses even compared to the rigorous college I went to. Part of it was my classmates–in senior year IB classes, level of conversation was on par with level of conversation in college classes. Also, the types of thinking we had to do were the types of thinking required in college. Lots of working with primary sources, no textbooks, lots of theory, and almost no busy work. The reading load was also on par with an intro college course. The exams were mostly long essay questions, with some short answer/multiple choice stuff for the hard sciences, and the format didn’t feel too stifling. FWIW, I didn’t really try to skip many intro courses in college and I still found the intro courses useful, since the overlap in content wasn’t total. I instead think of IB as providing more like an extra year of college for free and preparation me to hit the ground running as a freshman.
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I’ve seen my kid’s experience with IB courses and talked with other families who’ve done the AP. Several academic buddies grade in the AP system. I take the courses as signs of achievement with a big grain of salt after seeing how much of some curricula was based in 1950s texts and not the ones that have best withstood the test of time!
Some of these classes do line up reasonably well. Others don’t. And when the student gets to be the one to experiment with that at the cost of their GPA and maybe their scholarship money, that’s pretty rough.
Pro-tip? When you tour universities, speak with department advisors and faculty to find out if taking an AP or IB credit works well in their system. Majors, particularly, might discover that they’re missing out on some key building-block activities in the first year or that the university’s intro sequence is very distinctive and doesn’t map well to IB or AP coverage.
One advantage to reasonably-priced university education such as we have here in Canada is that Eldest was able to take IB courses and not feel pressured to apply IB credits to getting out of first-year classes. Instead she can return to those subjects in the university classroom and she will for those related to her major.
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I would far rather my high schooler take an Honors course in any subject than an AP course in it–since the former can combine intellectual challenge with a much more flexible and deeper curriculum, and without being crippled by having to prepare for a standardized test. The problem is that many of the high school Honors courses seem to be getting replaced by AP courses.
I’ve been advised by a colleague who knows more about higher ed admissions than I do that it’s a good idea for students to take AP courses but skip the AP tests, since admissions officers look at a student’s AP coursework (in proportion to the average at their high school) as an indication of their willingness to seek out challenge and push themselves. But this still seems to miss the point to me, and ends up rewarding the AP system with a kind of clout and significance it really doesn’t deserve. I hope more universities follow Dartmouth’s lead.
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My AP English course was sort of Dead Poets’ Society, except without the suicide, ripping up textbooks and standing on desks. It was 5 girls and 1 boy. We met before school with Oreos to get in more time, did stuff outside school, and had t-shirts printed up. We had amazing esprit de corps.
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In the early 90s, I took AP English, US and Euro History, and Studio Art. Now I teach the first “half” of the US History survey to undergrads. While I learned a lot in AP US History–it was one of my favorite classes in high school–because the end goal was test prep, the course focused on names, dates, and events more than it did a deep understanding of historical forces. Even the Document-Based Questions were more about demonstrating knowledge of historical events than they were about analysis and interpretation. The survey I teach emphasizes deep, critical and creative thinking and requires a ton of engagement with a broad range of primary sources and material culture. I just can’t see the high school course as equivalent to mine–they’re two different creatures.
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Due to a somewhat messy academic path I happen to be able to compare AP US History in high school to Intro to Western Civilization at the College of DuPage (community) and History of European Civilization at the University of Chicago. The high school class was actually better than the community college one but vastly less rigorous, educationally useful, and primary source oriented that the Chicago course. As far as exams go I thought that (in 2006) German and Chemistry were reasonable, Calculus would have been a decent high school final but had a laughably generous curve, and the US Government and Economics exams were complete jokes. The problems with the last three being illustrated by the fact that I got a five on the Microeconomics test even though my high school did not teach Micro and my knowledge of the subject was limited to having read a combined macro/micro study guide once about a week before the exam. On the whole I think that colleges with adequate instructional resources to offer something better than high school (which should be all of them but in the real world may not be given the staffing and funding situation some institutions are facing) should probably ignore the AP exams and have their own placement exams for subjects that need them like foreign language.
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