How Smart Is AP?

By Claudia Wallis; Carolina A. Miranda

It's 8:30 in the morning, and the day is cold and rainy--conditions that, biologically, make it nearly impossible for the average teenager to function. Yet the 10 boys and eight girls who pour into the first-period Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus class at McNair Academic High School in Jersey City, N.J., seem remarkably alert. Maybe it's the influence of Victorina Wasmuth, their peppy, diminutive math teacher, who exudes a boundless enthusiasm as she introduces a lesson on Rolle's theorem and the extreme-value theorem, which, she explains, are key underpinnings of calculus. Wasmuth tosses out problems for her students to solve and then roves the room, examining their work. "You're all very smart!" she exclaims. "You're all capable of coming up with these theorems on your own."

Adam Capulong, 17, who sports the collared shirt and tie required for boys at this racially diverse urban magnet school, adores the class. "It brings all aspects of math together," says the straight-A student, who is hoping to go to Harvard. But the challenging college-level course is just one small serving on an academic plate that he has heaped with five additional AP courses, including AP French, AP English Literature and AP Art History. That's on top of the three AP courses he took as a junior and one as a sophomore. Capulong's fellow senior Nayla Scaramello, 17, carries a similar load, and she got an even earlier start on her nine AP courses. As a ninth-grader, she took AP U.S. History, with its daunting college-level reading list. "College is so competitive," she explains, "and you want to stand out. I want my transcript to reflect that I'm a hard worker."

Capulong and Scaramello may be hard-core overachievers, but they're part of a national trend. The thirst to stand out in the brutal college-admissions game is driving a kind of AP-mania all across the U.S. Last May 1.9 million AP exams were taken by 1.1 million U.S. high school students--more than double the number who took them in 1994 and more than six times the number who took them 20 years ago. During the past decade, the number of high schools offering AP classes has grown a third, to 14,904, or 60% of all U.S. high schools.

To feed the demand, the College Board, the New York City--based company best known for administering the SAT, keeps creating new AP courses and exams. Back in 1955, when AP was introduced, there were 11 courses. By 1990 there were 29. Today there are 34, ranging from Music Theory to Computer Science. Next fall there will be three more: Italian, Russian and Chinese. It's a booming business for the nonprofit College Board, which sells teaching guides and seminars to instructors, study guides and practice exams to students, and charges $82 for an AP exam. (Much of this covers the costs of paying high school teachers and college professors to grade the exams, which include essays as well as multiple-choice questions.)

All this growth is generally viewed as good news by the many fans of AP programs, who include parents, college-admissions officers and school administrators, as well as politicians on both sides of the aisle, who have called for additional funding to make AP courses more available to low-income students. A large selection of AP courses attended by a broad swath of the student body is widely seen as a measure of excellence for U.S. high schools and figures prominently in formulas that attempt to rank public high schools. The more active the AP program, the higher the rank and, often, the higher the school district's real estate values.

But in some quarters, educators are worried that AP, which was created as a way to give bright high school seniors a taste of college, is turning into something it was never meant to be: a kind of alternative high school curriculum for ambitious students that teaches to the test instead of encouraging the best young minds to think more creatively. And as AP expands, some educators have begun to question the integrity of the programs and ask whether the classes are truly offering students an extra boost or merely giving them filigree for their college applications.

To be sure, many AP programs are first rate. Calculus, especially in the hands of a gifted teacher like Wasmuth, is widely considered to be one of the best-thought-out AP programs, as is AP English Language and Composition, which teaches students how to critically analyze literary works. Two years ago, when the Center for Education at the National Academy of Sciences conducted one of the few serious studies of the AP curriculum ever done, it praised the AP Calculus program for achieving "an appropriate balance between breadth and depth."

But the balance was off for the three other courses examined. AP Chemistry, Biology and Physics were found to be too sweeping in scope, lacking the depth of a good college course. The study's authors concluded that the practice and understanding of laboratory work--a critical piece of college-level science--was given short shrift both in the AP teacher's manuals and on the exams. They lamented that a "significant number of examination questions ... appear to require only rote learning" rather than a deeper understanding of science.

The emphasis of breadth over depth is a charge commonly leveled at AP history courses as well. Teachers who oversee the U.S.- and European-history classes frequently complain that there is little time for discussion or debate in these fast-paced romps through a half-millennium or more of names, dates and battles. Dennis Kenny, who teaches the AP U.S. History course at McNair, has to keep an eye on the clock and calendar to make sure he covers the sprawling curriculum in time for the May exam. "We're usually struggling the last few weeks just to get to the Reagan years," he says. This fall, with a presidential campaign under way, Kenny would have loved to draw some lessons from current events, but, he laments, "there's no time. The kids love when we break away and talk about today's election, but I'm looking at the clock--and that's not a good thing."

It was the pell-mell nature of AP history classes in particular that prompted the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a top private school in New York City, to drop all AP courses four years ago. Last year the Montclair Kimberley Academy in New Jersey decided to drop AP U.S. History. A number of other top private schools, including Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, have always steered clear of AP courses. Myra McGovern, a spokeswoman at the National Association of Independent Schools, discerns "a movement from a small group of independent schools that have said no to AP courses," preferring to offer high-level classes that are more focused, less test-driven and perhaps more engaging. "Learning is about having a passion," observes McGovern. "The threat is that students are so concerned with how they appear to the colleges that they pack in all sorts of AP courses that may not even interest them."

To its credit, the College Board has taken its detractors seriously. The National Academy of Sciences report offered "really good criticism," says Trevor Packer, executive director of AP programs. In response, Packer says the company has sought funds from the National Science Foundation to improve its biology, physics and chemistry courses. A retooling of the U.S. History program is also under way. But those changes will fix only part of the problem. AP courses and exams are created by teams of university professors who periodically revisit the curriculums, but the program information they send out is simply a guideline for classroom instructors. There is no mandated curriculum, nor is there any required training of teachers for AP classes, which is why the quality of the courses can vary widely from school to school. "Ultimately, our quality control is in the exam," concedes Packer.

It's not a perfect tool. As a 10th-grader, Todd Rosenbaum, now a junior at the University of Virginia, took a biology course that met just twice a week and offered no labs, but he crammed so successfully for the AP exam that he earned a 5 (tops on AP's 5-point scale). That score allowed the high school valedictorian to skip introductory biology at the university, but he found himself woefully unprepared for an upper-level course. "Pretty much as soon as I got in, I realized that there was no way I'd survive," says Rosenbaum. He withdrew from the course and wrote an essay for the college paper urging the university "to take a more skeptical approach in accepting AP scores."

At least Rosenbaum took the AP test (actually, he took 16 of them). About one-third of students who proudly list AP courses on their transcripts never take the exams, which are optional. Many top universities, including Harvard and M.I.T., have tightened their terms for granting credit or advanced standing on the basis of AP scores. They recognize that an exam-oriented class taken by 10th- and 11th-graders, no matter how bright and hardworking, is generally not the equivalent of a rigorous college course. "If you're being told that this is a college course, you're being told things that are not true," says Douglas Taylor, who chairs the University of Virginia biology department.

But even as some college department heads downgrade the value of APs, admissions officers continue to regard them as a hallmark of the student who enjoys a challenge. "If the school offers APs, we expect that the students are taking them," says Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at M.I.T.

"This is not a case of whoever has the most APs wins," insists Stanford director of undergraduate admissions Anna Marie Porras. But as kids like Adam Capulong and Nayla Scaramello know, it certainly doesn't hurt. This fall 424 students at McNair Academic signed up for AP courses. That's three-quarters of the student body. o