Advanced Placement or Advanced Play?

My last two posts may have attacked some of the virtues of math and science (in which my major actually resides) but today I will be talking about an issue stemming from the whole educational spectrum: Advanced Placement.

I will have to admit that in high school, I jumped onto the AP curriculum head on. Essentially for pride, I skipped a level in AP physics and self-studied the higher-level AP Calculus course the same year that I was in the intro section.

Did I pass with "flying colors?" Yes. Do I know a good deal of the information still? Maybe. Do I regret my decision to bolster myself essentially as a competing corporation of intelligence? Absolutely.

The Advanced Placement curriculum was developed with one sole purpose: to allow high school students to achieve college credit before even the first toss of the graduation cap. This enables potential undergraduates to save a huge chunk of their tuition and possibly even graduate a year or two early. Financially, spending $92 vs approximately $2500 for the average Penn State class is a no brainier, which is why the program gained its initial prominence.

However, with prominence comes increased competition. It wasn't too long until nearly every gifted student in the high school was taking at least one AP class, and many where trying to juggle six or seven in a school year. As colleges subsequently saw broader applicant pools, and standing out became more and more difficult with all of us in Track, Marching Band, and Student Government, maybe the AP was the place to showcase our aptitudes above the rest.

But what is the limit on how we treat such treasures of one-upping each other? I am going to discuss two approaches:

Diversifying a student's schedule

In all honesty, I fell into the trap during my sophomore and junior years of high school that I may have not diversified my schedule enough. I was a level ahead in mathematics and heavily partook in the PLTW engineering classes (see last post), but besides the basics of English and History, lacked any humanities curriculum whatsoever. I wouldn't call myself an anomaly with such a situation. Students in my school have skipped three levels of mathematics since middle school by taking summer prep courses, and will have exhausted the school's course offerings before junior year! Meanwhile, their humanities side lays largely dormant of any of the Manhattan-like bustle found in the tech-sides of their brains.

In addition to the obvious desires for some students to become the next Einstein or Watson, the schools themselves may be the culprit as many don't offer a spiced-up humanities curriculum of AP Comparative Government, 3D Modeling, and Art History. Most schools tend to offer the whole sphere of AP STEM while neglecting other foci, forcing students to compete on a single track and get stuck in the one-upping game of skipping courses.

Restricting the usage of the whole standardized AP system

Broadening the breadth of courses taken may certainly help reduce the degree of over-competitiveness in high schools. However, students would then logically compare themselves to others based on the actual number of advanced courses they are taking. Teenagers are stuck into a mindset that since colleges desire rigorous curricula, having 12 APs sophomore year vs 11 would be a big boost. They need see college admission and college preparedness as two different subjects. Cramming for 12 AP exams in the two week period only sometimes makes the student more appealing to admissions officers, but more often than not renders them unprepared for the 200-level course they were previously so eager to take.

Much of the culprit lies in the heavy multiple-choice nature of the exams, and their standardization. Students are not taught how to show their creative abilities or be flexible with professor U or V in University W. They don't see that the real world is not graded on a universal 9-point rubric.

The AP certainly challenges the best and brightest youngsters, both in the USA and abroad. However, standardizing a curriculum can only mine so much gold in these students. Enrichment needs to exist exclusively from contest and link to enlighteninment and flexible thought. Enlightenment takes more than cramming Barron's AP History to sprout full-length wings; creativity and deep reflection mold with any position in life, be it a 7AM college lecture or an overnight shift before that all-too-important symposium.

Sources:

• http://blog.prepscholar.com/the-5-worst-problems-with-college-board-ap-program

• https://apscore.collegeboard.org/scores/ap-awards/ap-scholar-awards//