This article is strange. Unless something has changed recently, AP exams do not have a concept of pass or fail. You get a score and colleges can choose to give you college credit based on the score.
I got a 1 on the AP Calculus exam but colleges wanted a 3 or a 4 or a 5 depending on their requirements to give me credit for college calc. So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'.
I have no doubt he's probably an exceptional teacher. That AP Calculus test was really really hard when I took it a decade ago, but the metrics don't make any sense to me
And even that breaks down by colleges in universities. This was not the case for me. Virginia Tech has 2 calculus courses. One for Math/CS/Eng majors and the one for everyone else. I was in the former and they did not accept my 3.
Anecdotally when I took them 14 years ago 3+ was considered passing, and most mid-level schools took 3+ for credit except for things they specialized in, with higher tier schools requiring 4+ in more subjects.
The AP Board has a school lookup and the few schools I looked at (a mix of big state schools and more elite private universities) seemed to bear this pattern out.
I had a conversation with a prof from Harvey Mudd and another prof from somewhere else who was an AP calc grader. The HMC prof said they quit giving credit for 5's because not all recipients of 5's could do the work. The grader commented that he could understand how, as the range of 5's is quite broad. My take-away was that there is insufficient granularity at the high end.
I also wonder if there is also a difference in focus between your university and the AP exam. For instance my highschool allowed use of TI-89 and focused heavily on concepts and word problems. This was similar to the AP exam, so I was top of my class in Calculus and scored a 5 on the AP exam. However in college I struggled in post BC calculus like diff-EQ because they put a strong emphasis on differentiating and integrating by hand and banned all but the simplest calculator.
I had that same conversation with a prof from Occidental College.
In this case it was more like griping that people who had placed out of freshman Calc because of AP did not, in many cases, understand Calculus. They knew enough to pass the Calc AP exam, but they had a very shallow understanding, so they couldn't use their knowledge in applications.
He said they really hated the push to get so many students to place out via AP, because it was only hurting them later.
We have some students with tight programs (for instance, future elementary educators) where the extra course is a big help, so there is that on the other hand.
Also, in the last several years it's become more and more common for AP classes to simply "teach to the test". They pump our students who can get 5s on the test but have little practical knowledge of the subject.
I was shocked I got 5 in physics, doing well in multiple choice made up for skipping two of the five word problems. It seems weird to have the best possible score not require answering all the questions correctly.
To be fair, a 5 on something like Calc BC means you got more than like 60% credit. It's not surprising that someone on the low end of that would struggle.
It depends on your school. 3 is considered passing grade by the collegeboard, but some schools only accept 4+. For example UCI [0] allows 3 for credit, but USC [1] only accepts 4 or above, which I guess is progress since in high school one of the factors (besides the price) was that USC wouldn't accept any AP credits at all.
Just a nitpick: as others have mentioned, the College Board has no concept of a "passing" grade. Just numeric 1-5. It is colleges and teachers that consider a 3 or better "passing".
Because I just went through this: UNM (which is to be fair a large state school and has practicaly no entrance requirements) gives 3 hours for a 3 on CalcAB and 4hrs (which is the equivalent of their calc 1+lab) for a 4 or 5. but otherwise my microecon, usgov, phys1 and english comp all got credit on 3s.
NMT an hour south also gave me credits for those back a decade ago my first tie through college (though the classes themselves I think transfered as generic math or social studies credits not specific classes)
A few years ago, someone at Oxford University's admissions office said that U.S. students have almost no chance of getting in if they don't have 4 or 5 on various AP exams.
In general British university admissions are conditional on good exam results, as the British education system has no notion of "grades" other than scores on exams.
It's interesting to see where the 'pass' bar is in different countries. I've always found the 50% mark, which seems quite popular, to be rather unusual since it implies that someone who 'passed' essentially was correct on only half the material tested (which is then a fraction of the material actually taught), and in any other setting a 50% failure rate would be completely unacceptable.
Running a little off-topic, there is evidence that a Cambridge maths exam series 150 years ago had a pass mark of about one and a half percent, and the top scorer achieved about 45 percent.
I have had many tests where the material tested is not a strict subset of the material taught, and some problems require creative generalization or insight during the test.
I had this too in Mechanical Engineering, especially on exams where you have e.g. an hour and a half to solve 5 problems and more so as you take higher level classes. There would often be room for interpretation in the questions, and part of the problem was to make sure you're making the right assumptions about the system.
I remember one test in particular in a class about heat transfer where one question was essentially "Same problem as the previous question, but now assume <something less simplistic>". My answer was something along the lines of, "Whoops, I already made that assumption in the previous question. Extra points?" The professor was kind enough to grant me a few bonus points.
Not trying to brag, but I also took it a decade ago, (2005 to be exact) and i found it startlingly easy, and got a 5 no problem. So did many of my classmates. It made calculus 2 in college a breeze, since even though the exam had integral stuff on it, colleges would only give me credit for Calc 1.
> Nearly 2.5 million students took a total of almost 4.5 million AP tests overall last year. Of the test-takers, just 322 obtained every point possible on an AP test, and perfect scores were logged on 21 of the 36 AP exams. Here’s the breakdown of those perfect scores:
67 in Computer Science A
55 in Spanish Language and Culture
54 in Microeconomics
36 in German Language and Culture
22 in Macroeconomics
16 in Studio Art: Drawing Portfolio
12 in Calculus AB
11 in Calculus BC
11 in Physics C: Mechanics
7 in Japanese Language and Culture
7 in Studio Art: 2-D Design Portfolio
4 in Chemistry
4 in Psychology
4 in Italian Language and Culture
3 in U.S. Government and Politics
2 in French Language and Culture
2 in Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism
2 in Statistics
2 in U.S. History
2 in Studio Art: 3-D Design Portfolio
1 in Latin
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Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college.
I took AP Latin: Vergil in high school. That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex (I'm also not surprised Japanese has few perfect scores). I know I didn't get a passing score.
I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese is so simple compared to Latin or Japanese. And from what I recall, AP Chinese tested Mandarin at a 2nd grade level, and didn't test much or any of the chengyu (成語: Chinese proverbs) of which are difficult because of the shear number to remember.
Perhaps graders could tell they were native speakers, and thus raised the bar? (I took 3rd-year Chinese as a filler class "language requirement" in college and the professor expected high-school level of Chinese while she expected chicken scratch from others for the same grade.)
AP Computer Science seems likely to have a good number of perfect scores. I remember a test reviewer telling me that they often overlooked syntactical errors (unbalanced parentheses) and would allow API calls to incorrectly labeled API functions. (I don't disagree, because CS is more about understanding data structures than it is knowing how to put code on paper without an IDE or reference.)
I wouldn't be surprised that a native speaker would do something one way, and a test would insist the 'correct' way is actually pretty awkward and wouldn't be used.
This... In Vietnam seeing some (as a 30yr old native English speaker) of the "correct" answers to VN made English homework or tests is interesting to say the least. The questions are so awkward, pretty sure the only reason the students able to deduce the answer is because they have been taught vn-English so it makes sense to them ;)
I've always noticed ESL students who have progressed to fluency have a significantly better understanding of English from a technical standpoint. I know most of the rules by "gut feel", but they can actually recite the rule, identify parts of speech, etc. As a result I expect they would do better than I (a native speaker) on an extremely pedantic English exam.
I am a native Chinese speaker (lived in China till college), and I once tried the AP Chinese problems for fun with a friend of mine (also a native speaker). We both find it surprisingly difficult, because it really is geared towards second language learners. One speaking question was like, describe your favorite Chinese film and explain its cultural significance. Okay, I watch films with friends all the time, but it never occurred to me to ponder their "cultural significance", and I have only like 60 seconds to prepare.
> The film was banned in mainland China by the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television due to its critical portrayal of various policies and campaigns of the Communist government. In addition, Zhang [Yimou] was banned from filmmaking for two years.
I agree that it's a ridiculous question, but don't attribute that to the test being "geared towards second language learners". It's geared towards the priorities of US language teachers, which are heavily slanted towards "cultural appreciation" rather than actually getting students to know the language they're appreciating so much.
Judging by your comment, you are also a native speaker of English. Is that true? It's pretty unusual for someone who only left China as an adult.
> That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex
Did you study Latin for several years before? I think that class is typically intended for people who have already studied Latin at the high school level for three years (most likely reading Caesar or other authors first). That would give a lot more opportunity to become familiar with Latin grammar rules.
Yeah, I took it from 8th grade to 12th grade. In my class of 10 or so students, only one of us got a passing score. Perhaps our teacher didn't adequately challenge us. We had read Cicero and other Latin literature yet Latin grammar always seemed so challenging for me to parse. I could make out enough meaning but never do a literal translation well enough. I took it because I couldn't speak any of the Romance languages ;) I would have taken Japanese or Chinese in a heartbeat if they were offered since I had lived in Taiwan in my middle school years.
I got all the rules (declensions, conjugations, etc) but I always had trouble piecing them collectively. A lot of the declension endings would be the same (such as 4th declension nouns) and it was hard for me to differentiate between a nominative and accusative in the context of a sentence. Hence I never studied Latin in college. I'm sure the world is a much better place for that. Wow, I can't believe I am reopening old wounds from 12 years ago ;)
I genuinely believe the single perfect test score is also empirical proof of the difficulty of Latin in an English-speaking world...
I would much rather parse MIPS assembly all day than read Latin.
It's a really excellent demonstration of how difficult it can be to internalize certain things for people - I was eventually acceptably good at extracting meaning from Latin after years of taking it, but it never became anywhere near an internalized process of digesting the sentences, and my instructors were quite skilled in teaching and Latin.
One of the more interesting hypotheses suggested was that Latin classes, unlike a lot of SL classes, are not nearly as "immersive" as more common ones, and a lot of the language processing hardware we've got is better at digesting from spoken immersion. (Part of that, of course, is that outside of specialized environments, we don't really have any "native" speakers; part of that is also that common "spoken" Latin was a lot simpler than the brick-by-brick construction of Vergil or Cicero.)
I've done spoken Latin stuff as well as taking Latin classes, and I tentatively agree with my friends who are Latin teachers and use immersion in the classroom that it should help and that it's a big gap not to have it.
I also agree that the Vergil and Cicero constructions are harder than what you would hear at a spoken Latin gathering (or probably in a Latin-immersion class). The word order people usually use when speaking is more like modern Romance languages (with some tendency to put the verb at the end, but not, say, chiasmus!). That did make me think that ancient Romans probably didn't talk like Cicero or Vergil either. :-)
I always remember this line from Cicero
Magna dis immortalibus habenda est atque huic ipsi Iovi Statori, antiquissimo custodi huius urbis, gratia ...
in which "magna" 'great' modifies "gratia" 'thanks', which is the subject of "est habenda" 'should be given'. That's tricky, or at least a lot to keep in your head when trying to parse it.
I agree with everything up until the reading part. I took Latin 8-12th grade and reading it, but with the assistance of our professor, was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had. We topped off the last year studying Virgil, book 2 of the Aeneid, and Juvenal. Hard, but so great
How would design a uniform final exam for all, say, Calculus I courses? Sure, you can only test the intersection of all, but that encourages the teachers to only teach that subset. Instead, AP exams test the union of all, and normalize the score so that you only need, I think, a raw score of 60/100 to get a 5 on calculus. That way, teachers are encouraged to experiment with their curriculum, and students are not overwhelmed by the need to know everything there is to know. It's really a win-win solution.
Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college.
It's not surprising if you realise that AP tests can't be gamed as easily as tests designed (and possibly graded) by those who taught the students taking the tests.
What constitutes a perfect score? Is it no longer a 1-5 grade or is this talking about the underlying score before normalizing to a 5 point scale or were there only 322 5s?
Is this that unusual? I'm sure there are many teachers out there whose entire classes passed.
I'm pretty sure in high school, my entire class passed. It was unusual for people to fail APs. (My high school only admitted the top 2% scorers on an admission test, so it was biased towards high exam scorers.)
I think you underestimate some private schools. At least at mine, high level APs would have only 10ish specially approved students with a professor who'd taught the class forever. Our calc BC professor had supposedly only had 3 non-5s in his decade or two of teaching the course. Besides that, if a professor suspected you wouldn't pass, you would just be asked to not take the exam. Don't think I ever heard of someone actually failing one.
In the 1987, I took the afternoons of my senior year and went to the local community college since we got 3 credits a semester free and paid only $15/credit after that. Students are still doing that here (now its considered dual HS / College credit). AP classes just don't make sense in that context, and I would imagine if a student in a podunk high school on the reservation in the 80's could do that, it must be more common at decent high schools.
I went to a Catholic all-boys high school and many of us walked to the Catholic college a few blocks away to earn college credits. I'd say the top quarter of my graduating class started college as Sophomores or better.
From the other end, the Catholic grade school across the street sent some of their 7th and 8th graders to take classes with us at the high school.
I am not sure if such clean-looking, new-looking classes are standard in the US, but it gives me a tad of skepticism... Is this school in an affluent neighborhood?
I used to live in the neighborhood (Lincoln Heights). It's a lower income, primarily latino neighborhood of Los Angeles. I've never visited Lincoln High School but it's a public school.
LAUSD just went through a massive building/remodeling of facilities last few years. Not all schools got it but ones that were remodeled look nice. But that is after decades worth of students who went through LAUSD sitting in ghetto classrooms. After about a decade the same classes will start looking dingy and few more decades will pass before another wave of remodeling.
went to this school '06-10 and had to pleasure to get to know this teacher when he started there. Not much of an affluent neighborhood, lots of gang violence, but still lots of good people come out of it because of leaders like this teacher
caveat; this is a magnet program of about 200 students within the overall two thousand and some
My son attends LASA in Austin. His calc teacher has a 97% rate for his students scoring a 4 or 5 over 15 years. This includes a few students who didn't take the test.
Side note, FYI some embedded ad redirects me to the scammy "fix your Android" thing full of alerts and vibrating the phone. This has been a nightmare on Android recently, happens more and more even on high profile websites. Time to reconsider Firefox Mobile and put and adblocker I think...
Yom says he keeps getting asked if there's some secret recipe for getting students to perform at their highest potential.
"This may sound corny, but you really have to love them," Yom says. "You build this trust, and at that point, whatever you ask them to do, they'll go the extra mile. The recipe is love."
Basically it comes down to soft skills. If people think you care about them they will care about what you want and think and help you achieve things together.
Common Core, in theory, isn't a problem - unifying standards across schools has a lot of benefits (easier to design reusable curriculums, perform scientific inquiries, develop software). The problem is when it gets conflated with high-stakes testing, which is a terrible thing.
High-stakes testing need not be terrible. You just have to be careful:
1. High-stakes testing requires exam security. One must assume that the teachers and administrators, if rated on student performance, will assist cheating.
2. High-stakes testing should be spread out across the year, with the result being a running average that discards the low values. (sickness and other bad luck should not be punished) Instead of a week or two of solid testing, do an hour every other week.
3. Tests should not come from companies that sell textbooks. This is a conflict of interest. It's not good to have an incentive to use non-standard terminology to give an advantage to schools which purchase the matching book.
4. If you can't test something, and you don't mandate hours for it, it will be removed from the schedule. Ideally you'd test for everything, but testing some subjects (band, shop) is difficult. The hours must be mandated to protect the untestable subjects.
5. You get what you test for. (see #4 above) High-quality tests are a must. It shouldn't be practical to cram for a test.
You did not talk about the necessity of unlinking the results of high-stakes testing and the funding for schools/teachers/districts. Or at the very least, to not penalize low-income areas for low test scores by stripping their budget, since that will only make the situation worse. If anything, more resources should flow to areas with lower test scores, even though the opposite happens (or they just flow to charter schools, which are not a great idea either).
Look beyond the mechanical aspects of the problem, and consider the ramifications of testing within the education system as a whole.
Common core is _what_ they should be teaching. Soft skills is _how_ they should be teaching.
I'm fine if you want to hate on the Common Core like so many, but these points are so completely unrelated this argument doesn't make any sense. We aren't min/maxing teachers like we would with our character in an MMORPG, these are human people.
You can get people to do work based on the strength of a personal relationship, sure. I once gave an unexpectedly long assignment to a class of about 30 students, and ended up getting six completed assignments. One was from a student who was just absolutely determined to be "a good student". The other five were clearly done on the basis of my relationship with those five students rather than because they thought it was a reasonable use of their time.
I don't think that approach can scale, though. You can't maintain that kind of relationship with 50 people; you need them to enforce the norm ("do the work!") on each other.
Trans* people have been bullied pretty much forever. The tide is finally shifting to be able to force places like schools to change their polices to help reduce/end the bullying. It's clearly the correct thing to do.
If you're surprised by this, then your mental model of the world isn't correct. Might be time to re-calibrate your expectations if you (like I admittedly did) went to school in a nice neighborhood where 90%+ get a 5 in calc AB.
This is snobbish at best. Apart from the fact that there are various social and economic barriers it also isn't easy for everyone.
Perhaps you are biased from being surrounded by developers but It's akin to me (a non farmer) making a blanket statement like "Surely it isn't so hard to grow a tomato. Why are all these people in Africa starving?"
different person, different school, different time, but similar situation: dedicated individuals inspire students to believe circumstances better than where they grow up, and strive for them
oh, and similar communities. I could have gone to Garfield, the high school from Stand and Deliver, but opted for Lincoln, when I grew up in this area
It's been awhile but the AP exam for me was nothing but rote memorization. You memorize how to solve n types (10? 15? 20?) of problems and then you grind through the test a) identify what type of problem it is b) apply algorithm to solve.
Furthermore the AP exam environment, IMO, varied by the school giving it. I could have easily stored formulas in my calculator (for the calculator section), I could have easily colluded with classmates, and if my teachers wanted to, they could've easily given me the answers. It was a bit of a joke really. Multiple phones went off during the exam, no penalties were given (which I agree is the right approach, but it does say something about the exam itself).
The prestige of the AP program and the experience of taking a number of AP courses has contributed to my declining respect for our higher education system really.
In the framework of 'a) identify what type of problem it is b) apply algorithm to solve', how many freshman college classes (what the AP classes try to emulate) don't work within that framework?
While I believe our primary and higher education systems could use a lot of work, I think the AP program is at least respectable as a stepping stone into higher education, especially for communities where higher education isn't a norm or accessible.
I’ve traveled to Europe and Asia and it’s saddening to see what a difference they place on the value of Education/teacher compared to us. NC is ranked 48th in the country and willing to give away almost a billion dollars in federal funding over the right to bully transgender individuals.[1][2] Then we have Texas spending 64-million on a high school stadium.[3]
How did we get into this mess where our culture values sports over education? How can we get out of it?
I got a 1 on the AP Calculus exam but colleges wanted a 3 or a 4 or a 5 depending on their requirements to give me credit for college calc. So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'.
I have no doubt he's probably an exceptional teacher. That AP Calculus test was really really hard when I took it a decade ago, but the metrics don't make any sense to me