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A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

latimes.com

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Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#111

Post by School-Cotton »

dctoedt wrote: post #44
ejcx wrote: post #4

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 pr…

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.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#112

Post by schoen »

rincebrain wrote: post #105
jasonjei wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 language…

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,…

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.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#113

Post by mturmon »

dbcurtis wrote: post #90
jimhefferon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I teach Math at a college, and am a former dept chair. We require 4 or 5, as do the folks I talk to at other schools.

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 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.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#114

Post by justinclift »

SeanDav wrote: post #27
ejcx wrote: post #4

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 pr…

Apparently the result from the class on quantum physics is both a pass and a fail.

Depends how you look at it. ;)

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#115

Post by chillacy »

rajacombinator wrote: post #92
chillacy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year, 42% didn't: http://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Servic...

Wow that is surprising.

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.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#116

Post by dang »

x1798DE wrote: post #9
dang wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, we took 'how' out of the title above.

I must say, this kind of thing is what keeps me coming to HN. It's very refreshing to see actual anti clickbait policies on link aggregators.

Someone's got to do it. Plus it's an amusing challenge and something about which the community is as unanimous as it gets.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#117

Post by dang »

Cyph0n wrote: post #36
dang wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, we took 'how' out of the title above.

Actually it's /u/dang who keeps me coming back. The guy is a moderating machine! Keep up the awesome work man :)

In the face of praise like that I won't even hold the reddit URI against you.

Thanks!

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#118

Post by cafard »

EliRivers wrote: post #63
userbinator wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'. That reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grading_systems_by_country 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…

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Tripos

According to Ulam's memoirs, Hardy thought very poorly of the Tripos as a test of anything in particular.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#120

Post by jimhefferon »

mturmon wrote: post #113
dbcurtis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 o…

> 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.

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