A questionable course

ADVANCED PLACEMENT COURSES have long held a kind of magical allure for high school students of a certain clique. What other classes offer the chance to earn college credits? But now, 50 years after the first AP test was offered, AP courses are raising concerns familiar to the College Board, which also administers the exam’s older cousin, the SAT. And after an almost inexcusable delay, the University of California is asking a lot of the right questions.

Since the first AP exam in 1956, the industry has become a force unto itself. More than 15,000 U.S. schools offer at least one of the 35 AP courses, according to the College Board, which last week issued a 94-page “Advanced Placement Report to the Nation” detailing how many more students are taking and passing the courses. President Bush has even made AP courses a part of his education policy.

AP courses, however, are now less about students seeking out deeper knowledge than about kids racking up points to impress college admissions committees. Academics are increasingly concerned that, although the courses are more rigorous than average classes, their quality has grown uneven. Too many such classes emphasize memorization over research, analysis and writing. About a dozen elite high schools have stopped offering them, and some top universities have made it harder to get college credit for them.

Now the University of California, which for nearly a quarter of a century has given an extra grade point to applicants who take AP and certain honors courses, is reconsidering its AP policy. The UC regents had noble intentions when they introduced the policy in 1982. Concerned that high school students were avoiding tough courses, the board hoped to encourage students not to shy from challenging coursework. So they decided a student shouldn’t be penalized for taking an AP class; a B in an AP course would count as an A in a regular class, a C as a B, and so on. (An A in an AP class was literally off the charts, allowing students to inflate their grade-point average beyond a perfect 4.0.) Since then, AP courses have proliferated as students rack up as many as they can in the nuclear arms race of grade inflation.

In 1999, the UC faculty admissions committee recommended reducing the credit that students receive for taking AP classes, citing studies that found AP courses were a mediocre predictor of UC success. It also was growing increasingly obvious that reliance on AP courses discriminated against low-income and rural students, who attended schools that offered few, if any, AP courses. Despite these solid arguments, the regents tabled the matter.

Since then, an effort to bring more AP courses to low-income and rural schools has made some inroads, although it fell back during bad budget times. And last year, a UC task force found many of the same problems with the AP policy, and pointed out that other elite universities seldom award extra AP credit to applicants.

Now the UC faculty admissions committee is preparing to recommend that the system drop the AP credit entirely. Instead, the idea is to look more comprehensively at whether students took some of the more rigorous courses available at their schools. This time, the regents should listen.

AP courses can be a fine addition to a high school curriculum, and the College Board deserves credit for its role in encouraging high schools across the country to offer more high-level classes. But a class well-designed by a teacher or district can be just as valuable. In the end, the lesson should be that higher standards are about learning.