ExamThe fee for each AP Exam is $89. The school normally retains $8 of that fee as a rebate to help with administrative costs.
Why limit yourself to the few subjects covered by AP exams? When I was a Montgomery County Public Schools counselor, I was dismayed by the stranglehold AP exams had on students. Many wouldn’t consider taking non-AP classes (such as philosophy and comparative religion)http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/advanced-placement-classes-can-be-limiting-to-students/2014/05/14/43ccc436-d9f4-11e3-a837-8835df6c12c4_story.html
...Along with the intense curriculum of multiple AP’s, students who take these classes are also basically required to take the expensive exam at the end of the year. Those who chose not to are required to take a purposely more difficult test created by the teacher. In this way, students feel even more pressure to spend their money on the College Board exam.
Many CHS students work in order to pay for their daily expenses. At minimum wage, these earnings take a lot of effort. These students should not have to put their well-earned cash toward an exam that will likely not count towards college credit in the future.
Along with AP exams, students are also bombarded by other costs imposed by the College Board. Students are pressured to pay to take the SAT or ACT multiple times in order to achieve a highly competitive score. Do not forget about SAT subject tests, which are becoming required by more and more schools. Each of these exams costs up to $50. Combined with the price of AP exams, the costs charged by the College Board can really add up and financially upset many families...
- See more at: http://www.thechurchillobserver.com/opinions/2014/02/28/ap-exams-are-too-expensive/#sthash.uoMFFshp.dpuf
...Designed a half-century ago to give a few thousand elite students a chance to skip introductory college classes, Advanced Placement is now the required portal to college for any ambitious teen.
But its widespread acceptance as a national gold standard has altered the nature of high school for students like Boltz, some critics say. They see an education system that rewards top students who take 10 to 12 AP classes during their high school careers — the equivalent of more than a year of college — but narrows the choice of classes they can take and creates undue stress.
The system is driven partly, they say, by colleges that use Advanced Placement — the number of classes taken and exam scores earned — to rank applicants, and by savvy local school administrators who want to boost a school's national rankings. School districts routinely point to those rankings, giving principals an incentive to get more students to take the classes.
Now some parents, educators and even university admissions officers are rethinking the role of AP classes. A Baltimore County parents group wants teachers and administrators to be more upfront about the demands of the classes.
Hundreds of thousands of high school students enroll in Advanced Placement classes each year, with hopes to strengthen high school transcript and earn college credit. In a piece for the Atlantic, former college professor and high school teacher John Tierney argues that AP courses don't deliver their promised benefits...
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/03/166414595/op-ed-ap-classes-are-a-scam
Currently, The Gazette is running a series titled, “Sit down with Starr over the summer.” As of Aug. 1, staff writer Jen Bondeson, who regularly covers Montgomery County Public Schools, has reported seven sit-downs with MCPS Superintendent Josh Starr.
Click here to read the Aug. 1 installment in The Gazette.The Aug. 1 sit-down deals with academic pressures facing kids. But when Bondeson asked Starr about the source of the pressure to excel in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes, Starr punted and suggested that MCPS kids themselves were the source of the pressure. Starr also noted that parents seeking “an Ivy League” college for their sons and daughters also added to the pressures.
I’m saying Starr punted on the blame because I do not believe that kids or their parents are the primary source behind the AP/IB race (pressure)...
article continues in Rockville PATCH.
The National Center for Education Statistics plans to check data on about 5,000 high schools after faulty information from the federal agency led to erroneous rankings for three high schools on U.S. News & World Report’s yearly “Best High Schools” report......However, Jeff Horn, the principal at Green Valley High School in Henderson, Nev., noted that his school’s number 13 ranking was based on federal statistics that mistakenly said his school had 477 students, 111 teachers, and a 100 percent passing rate on Advanced Placement tests that school year. In actuality, the school has about 2,850 students, a student-teacher ratio that is closer to 24 to 1, and an AP pass rate of about 64 percent. Student-teacher ratios and AP pass rates are a part of the magazine’s ranking system...
At Richard Montgomery High School, students in the Middle Years Programme are learning U.S. History in the same class as Advanced Placement students, and one teacher at the school thinks student learning is being sacrificed.
Brian Donlan, a social studies teacher at the Rockville school, issued a formal complaint to the school administration Thursday that accuses the school of labeling the class both AP and MYP to satisfy MYP requirements and offer AP courses. The number of AP students at a school boosts its placement on the Washington Post/Newsweek Challenge Index, which ranks performance of schools nationwide...
...“I believe the actions by the Richard Montgomery leadership are misleading to colleges and universities about the rigor of courses taken by students,” Donlon wrote in the complaint...
READ FULL ARTICLE AT THIS LINK.
....If the AP exams were an Olympic footrace with four major teams—a white team, an Asian team, a Latin team, and a black team—the black team would come in dead last. The black team is so far behind it probably gets lapped by the white and Asian teams.
There was a time when MCPS could barely say it had a black team in the AP footrace. Black AP participation rates were horribly low. That is no longer the situation, and frankly, MCPS gets credit for jacking up AP participation rates for all students. But MCPS should not just be proud of getting the black team in the race. Nor should MCPS try to dupe the public into thinking that because the black MCPS team outruns black AP teams from Harlem, Prince George's County and Atlanta that the AP performance gap within our county has closed. It has not closed and that must change.
