I dunno, they could try studying and doing their homework like we had to.
I got an email yesterday from a high school senior girl who took AP English. There was not a single comma or period in her paragraph. Nothing was capitalized. Unbelievable.
I’ll keep on homeschooling my kids. They seem to have no problems getting scholarships and getting into colleges. And once there, they are at the tops of their classes. And I did it all without AP classes. Imagine!
Look for Fairfax AP scores to plummet. The next step will be 'dumbing down' the AP tests so that 'minorities' will 'perform better'.
The SATs and ACTs have already been dumbed down substantially. I helped my daughter study for them, and she got above 750 every time (and 800s on all three sections of the SAT, though not at the same time). The questions are easier and the test is shorter. And the "writing" section is a complete laugher.
Our high school (private, nominally Presbyterian - my daughter, my mother and I all graduated there) still has the three tier system and I'm sure will continue to do so.
I know I shout this all the time here but it's still true: School performance is FAR more dependent on the students' own willingness to work hard and desire to learn...which, comes from their PARENTS. Could it be that these "minority" kids come from households where the parents have 5th grade educations themselves and don't instill the value of education in their children? Naa, it would be racist to say that!
“A C? I guess the letter C stands for ‘My teacher is a racist’. I took AP Trigonometry to learn about stars and s%$#, not all these numbers. Find for X? Here it is, right here on the paper. How is that wrong?”
Just when you thought dumbing down education couldn’t get any worse.
I guess AP will stand for: Almost Passing.
Now, they may "dumb down" the AP later, but until they do, I look at this as challenging the students more, not less.
Now that's progress!
Check out Steve Sailer blog entry “The forever war over tracking” for good discussion of this
If you want college credit for an AP class I believe you have to pay a fee for the final exam and get a certain score on it ..B??? .. it would be interesting to see if the token students take the exams or pass them ..
I have mixed feelings here. AP courses now dominate kids lives. Add in all of the other resume building--and they don't have time for church or even just being a kid without becoming completely exhausted.
AP is not for everyone. In fact, I would argue that college itself is not for everyone. A college diploma is in fact "overvalued" in many cases. But the upper middle class is now obsessed with credentials.
Our high school started offering many more AP classes this year but I believe it was due to some large “grant” they received.
Where I came from, “honors” and “AP” meant the same thing for seniors. For underclassmen, “honors” put you on track to the “AP” course as a senior, though you could work your way up into them (or down out of them) from year to year. I placed high enough on my AP exams to get 2 semesters college credit each for calculus and chemistry. (Add to that the fact that my college waived the freshman composition requirement based on my SAT verbal and high school class rank, and I actually finished my freshman year of college in one semester.)
For “non-academic” courses, an “honors” designation required putting in some form of extra work — in my music classes (band and chorus), honors students were required to put in the extra work and practice to audition for selection to the all-state music festival (oddly enough, I never made all-state chorus in CT, but I did make it to all-New England chorus my senior year — different auditions, different results, I guess).
"Here is a shocker: According to a study called "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing" that appears in the May 2011 issues of Perspectives on Psychological Science, white people believe all-white racism is now a bigger problem than anti-black sentiment."
I have encouraged my children, two of whom have graduated high school with two years of AP credits, to use this basis in knowledge not to make their college education shorter, but to take more challenging college courses.
In my opinion, most high school classes should match the rigor of AP courses.
You have to pay to take the AP exams, I think. And it’s not cheap. I think that could be why the poor kids didn’t sign up for the AP classes if there was a middle tier available.
There's a phrase to trigger a gag reflex.
Yep, keep lowering the standard.
Advanced Placement = Slackers free ride ticket