It's All in The Game
Just thought I'd pass on an interesting article containing reactions to a New York Times Magazine story about the amount of high school students in AP classes. The thing that jumps off the page the most about this story is the increasing phenomenon of AP classes being used merely as a tool for college applications by students, and reputation management by high schools. What started as a program designed to give high performing students more challenging material and a leg up on their college studies has become a prerequisite for anyone planning on applying to highly selective schools. What's more, it has become a means by which to measure high schools, as the Newsweek review of the top 100 high schools in the country uses a simple formula for ranking schools: divide the amount of AP tests taken by the amount of seniors in a graduating class.
Unfortunately students and school efforts to gain an advantage within this system have betrayed the original intentions of the AP program, and the goals of a high school in general. Schools responded to the rankings by lowering admissions standards for AP classes, thus cheapening the value of the class for many of the students who would've met the original standards, and by requiring students to take the test (often times subsidizing their test fees), but not having the AP test grade count for their class grade. What that means is that you get scenes an awful lot like the one during my AP European History test, where students who's test fees had been paid by the school district (read: taxpayers) were forced to take a test they had no intention of attempting to pass, and instead spent their time drawing pornographic cartoons into the scantron sheet and writing stream-of-consciousness essays about Jell-O Jigglers from the perspective of Bill Cosby.
All in all it reminds me perhaps most of a quote from the HBO television show The Wire. If you haven't watched The Wire do immediately, as there's a strong chance it will go down as one of the greatest literary works of this century (yes you read that correctly), but don't worry this quote wont give anything away. In it Deputy Police Commissioner Bill Rawls bemoans the bureaucratic inefficiencies of his deprtment, saying, It’s a numbers game, and numbers games breed more numbers games...And he who owes his good fortunes to numbers abides in them. We’ve got to show arrests are up 15-20%, we’ll worry about the quality later...it’s a con game, a band aid on cancer."
Unfortunately the College Admissions process, the need to find every edge within an existing system, and for a student to prove his or her worth against those from other schools, has created the same numbers game within our high schools. It doesn't even really matter if students are prepared for college when they get there, it matters more that they get there. That their entire high school experience is essentially collateral damage is, well, all part of the game.
Unfortunately students and school efforts to gain an advantage within this system have betrayed the original intentions of the AP program, and the goals of a high school in general. Schools responded to the rankings by lowering admissions standards for AP classes, thus cheapening the value of the class for many of the students who would've met the original standards, and by requiring students to take the test (often times subsidizing their test fees), but not having the AP test grade count for their class grade. What that means is that you get scenes an awful lot like the one during my AP European History test, where students who's test fees had been paid by the school district (read: taxpayers) were forced to take a test they had no intention of attempting to pass, and instead spent their time drawing pornographic cartoons into the scantron sheet and writing stream-of-consciousness essays about Jell-O Jigglers from the perspective of Bill Cosby.
All in all it reminds me perhaps most of a quote from the HBO television show The Wire. If you haven't watched The Wire do immediately, as there's a strong chance it will go down as one of the greatest literary works of this century (yes you read that correctly), but don't worry this quote wont give anything away. In it Deputy Police Commissioner Bill Rawls bemoans the bureaucratic inefficiencies of his deprtment, saying, It’s a numbers game, and numbers games breed more numbers games...And he who owes his good fortunes to numbers abides in them. We’ve got to show arrests are up 15-20%, we’ll worry about the quality later...it’s a con game, a band aid on cancer."
Unfortunately the College Admissions process, the need to find every edge within an existing system, and for a student to prove his or her worth against those from other schools, has created the same numbers game within our high schools. It doesn't even really matter if students are prepared for college when they get there, it matters more that they get there. That their entire high school experience is essentially collateral damage is, well, all part of the game.
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