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

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

#11

Post by swang »

hammock wrote: post #7
pilom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most colleges give credits for 3 and above on AP exams so many people think of a 3 as "passing".

Source? All the schools I looked at required a 4 or 5.

It depends on your school. 3 is considered passing grade by the collegeboard, but some schools only accept 4+. For example UCI [0] allows 3 for credit, but USC [1] only accepts 4 or above, which I guess is progress since in high school one of the factors (besides the price) was that USC wouldn't accept any AP credits at all.

[0] https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/creditandplacement/credit...

[1] https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/creditandplacement/credit...

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

#12

Post by showerst »

hammock wrote: post #7
pilom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most colleges give credits for 3 and above on AP exams so many people think of a 3 as "passing".

Source? All the schools I looked at required a 4 or 5.

Here's a site that calls 3+ passing - http://blog.prepscholar.com/average-ap-scores-for-every-ap-e...

Anecdotally when I took them 14 years ago 3+ was considered passing, and most mid-level schools took 3+ for credit except for things they specialized in, with higher tier schools requiring 4+ in more subjects.

The AP Board has a school lookup and the few schools I looked at (a mix of big state schools and more elite private universities) seemed to bear this pattern out.

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

#13

Post by fortenforge »

dsugarman wrote: post #10
srtjstjsj wrote: post #6

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/1... > Nearly 2.5 million students took a total of almost 4.5 million AP tests overall last year. Of the test-takers, just 322 obtained every point possible on an AP test, and perfect scores were logged on 21 of the 36 AP exams. Here’s the breakdown of those perfect scores: 67 in Computer Science A 55 in Spanish Language and Culture 54 in Microeconomics 36 in…

What constitutes a perfect score? Is it no longer a 1-5 grade or is this talking about the underlying score before normalizing to a 5 point scale or were there only 322 5s?

This is talking about scores before normalizing.

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

#14

Post by Frompo »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #6

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/1... > Nearly 2.5 million students took a total of almost 4.5 million AP tests overall last year. Of the test-takers, just 322 obtained every point possible on an AP test, and perfect scores were logged on 21 of the 36 AP exams. Here’s the breakdown of those perfect scores: 67 in Computer Science A 55 in Spanish Language and Culture 54 in Microeconomics 36 in…

Probably reflect the differing priorities of the people constructing the two different tests.

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

#15

Post by ktRolster »

jobu wrote: post #8
wkdown wrote: post #2

The "how" is quite lacking.

Seems pretty clear to me: Yom says he keeps getting asked if there's some secret recipe for getting students to perform at their highest potential. "This may sound corny, but you really have to love them," Yom says. "You build this trust, and at that point, whatever you ask them to do, they'll go the extra mile. The recipe is love." Basically it comes down to soft skills. If people think you care about them they will…

Which would explain why new 'systems' like common whatever, pushed from the top down, aren't the best way to improve schools.

Which is like forcing programmers into a forced Agile system....it's better to focus on improving the skills of the programmers.

The guy in Stand and Deliver was similar.

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

#16

Post by Avshalom »

hammock wrote: post #7
pilom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most colleges give credits for 3 and above on AP exams so many people think of a 3 as "passing".

Source? All the schools I looked at required a 4 or 5.

Because I just went through this: UNM (which is to be fair a large state school and has practicaly no entrance requirements) gives 3 hours for a 3 on CalcAB and 4hrs (which is the equivalent of their calc 1+lab) for a 4 or 5. but otherwise my microecon, usgov, phys1 and english comp all got credit on 3s.

NMT an hour south also gave me credits for those back a decade ago my first tie through college (though the classes themselves I think transfered as generic math or social studies credits not specific classes)

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

#18

Post by jasonjei »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #6

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/1... > Nearly 2.5 million students took a total of almost 4.5 million AP tests overall last year. Of the test-takers, just 322 obtained every point possible on an AP test, and perfect scores were logged on 21 of the 36 AP exams. Here’s the breakdown of those perfect scores: 67 in Computer Science A 55 in Spanish Language and Culture 54 in Microeconomics 36 in…

I took AP Latin: Vergil in high school. That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex (I'm also not surprised Japanese has few perfect scores). I know I didn't get a passing score.

I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese is so simple compared to Latin or Japanese. And from what I recall, AP Chinese tested Mandarin at a 2nd grade level, and didn't test much or any of the chengyu (成語: Chinese proverbs) of which are difficult because of the shear number to remember.

Perhaps graders could tell they were native speakers, and thus raised the bar? (I took 3rd-year Chinese as a filler class "language requirement" in college and the professor expected high-school level of Chinese while she expected chicken scratch from others for the same grade.)

AP Computer Science seems likely to have a good number of perfect scores. I remember a test reviewer telling me that they often overlooked syntactical errors (unbalanced parentheses) and would allow API calls to incorrectly labeled API functions. (I don't disagree, because CS is more about understanding data structures than it is knowing how to put code on paper without an IDE or reference.)

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

#19

Post by fisherjeff »

ktRolster wrote: post #15
jobu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty clear to me: Yom says he keeps getting asked if there's some secret recipe for getting students to perform at their highest potential. "This may sound corny, but you really have to love them," Yom says. "You build this trust, and at that point, whatever you ask them to do, they'll go the extra mile. The recipe is love." Basically it comes down to soft skills. If people think you care about them they will…

Which would explain why new 'systems' like common whatever, pushed from the top down, aren't the best way to improve schools. Which is like forcing programmers into a forced Agile system....it's better to focus on improving the skills of the programmers. The guy in Stand and Deliver was similar.

I don't see any reason why the two should be mutually exclusive

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

#20

Post by ktRolster »

fisherjeff wrote: post #19
ktRolster wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would explain why new 'systems' like common whatever, pushed from the top down, aren't the best way to improve schools. Which is like forcing programmers into a forced Agile system....it's better to focus on improving the skills of the programmers. The guy in Stand and Deliver was similar.

I don't see any reason why the two should be mutually exclusive

It's more like an ordering: improving teacher skill should come before forcing them into a system.
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