Dissecting AP Classes: Should Athenian Offer Them or Not?
On any given week in May, you’ll find dozens of Athenian students groaning about their upcoming AP (Advanced Placement) exams, lamenting the College Board and their torturous antics. Some put incredible effort into preparing for these tests, toiling for hours at their desks to review concepts they’ve learned throughout the entire year. So what do they receive in return for their efforts? The answer is simple: a single number from one to five. No error analysis, no comments, no nuance.
This standardization, whether it be in AP exams or other national tests, has washed the nation, and Athenian is left to consider how it ought to respond to this impending wave. Would a more standardized curriculum, replete with AP classes and exams, be beneficial for Athenian students, or does an Athenian education hinge on anti-standardization principles?
Before diving into this inquiry, we must delineate the origin of AP classes. The AP exams started as a pilot program in the 50s, amid concerns that students in high school were not being adequately prepared for advanced coursework in college and graduate education. Note that their original purpose was to aid underprepared students in accessing higher education, not to supplement the coursework of already prepared students. This directly contrasts how AP classes are viewed today: as a way for high-achieving students to further challenge themselves and receive college credit.
At Athenian, given that most honors courses already mandate either a high grade in a previous class or the passage of a placement exam, most students that would be taking a given AP course would already have to be prepared for the course content ahead of time. In this way, Athenian students are less so utilizing the AP coursework to prepare themselves, and more so attempting to demonstrate their ability to manage a “rigorous” course load in college admissions and earn college credits. In other words, AP classes being inserted into Athenian’s culture only serves to fuel anxiety surrounding college admissions for much of the Athenian student body, and it largely fails to aid underprepared students at Athenian, since most of the people taking these AP courses are literally required to already be somewhat prepared for the course content.
The AP curriculum also presents a dilemma in terms of equity, a principle ingrained in Athenian’s foundation. To ace an AP exam, it is essential that the student understands the grading schemes and test organization. Put differently, while receiving a high mark on an AP test is somewhat indicative of one’s knowledge of the material, it is also a measure of how well a student was able to prepare for the exam. Herein lies the origin of the inequity: certain students simply have more access to resources and guidance that help them learn how to effectively prepare for AP tests than others.
In this way, while AP exams do measure a student’s comprehension of a subject, they’re also testing how effectively that student can deconstruct and understand the test itself. Those students who have less access to learning how to master this standardized curriculum are therefore at a disadvantage in the testing process.
As previously mentioned, these standardized classes and exams fail to provide students with the individualized attention that often facilitates effective learning. The AP tests, which grant a simple score of one to five to each tester, tell the student next to nothing about their exact comprehension of the material—it merely reflects how many questions were responded to accurately. This means that the student would have no way of determining which concepts they understood and which topics they made errors in. This leaves the student with no information to improve and develop their understanding of the material after having taken the exam.
Moreover, by definition, standardized curriculums in AP courses do not account for individual circumstances and conditions. If a student was scoring low on their tests in an AP class, it would reflect that they perhaps did not perform up to a certain standard, but it doesn’t speak to how well the student was able to apprehend the material in the context of their learning environment. Athenian has long advertised its attention to individuals in the classroom setting—from small class sizes to frequent C&C periods. To maintain this ideal, Athenian should stray from standardization to grant its students a more comprehensive and nuanced learning experience.
