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AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

npr.org

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Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#21

Post by roguecoder »

jlarocco wrote: post #8
wmf wrote: post #2

If AP classes don't give credit, I wonder if this will lead some students to graduate high school after three years.

And get a jump start working on their Bachelor's degrees which now take six years. Seems like the high schools need to add some more rigorous classes for seniors.

A high school degree ought to be good for something. Students are entitled to four years of effective free education. If high schools can't engage them I think the government should be on the hook for the bill for the first year of college.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#22

Post by protomyth »

wmf wrote: post #2

If AP classes don't give credit, I wonder if this will lead some students to graduate high school after three years.

I took classes at the local community college at night of my Junior year in HS, and during the afternoon of my Senior year since my HS didn't have AP courses (heck, they didn't teach trigonometry or above in Math). It seems like a pretty good strategy then and it will probably be going forward. Community College tend to have better 100 level courses since you get a person hired as an instructor.

Graduating early just mean problems in the dorms and paying for expensive 100 level courses.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#23

Post by snake_plissken »

I don't get it. You can't make things harder than they are by their nature; sure, you can make interestingly problems, but in a discipline is a discipline. For example, general calculus hasn't changed that much in decades. The same stuff I learned in AP calc senior year of highschool, people learned freshman year of college. The only thing was, in highschool the exam questions were actual problems and not proofs of Stokes theorem or some other wildly pure math question.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#24

Post by ghaff »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #5

Maybe the AP system has degraded over the years. When I was in school it helped immensely and I was able to enter college as a mid-year sophomore and graduate early. And the level of material and rigor in AP courses seemed roughly comparable to 100 and 200 level college courses. The cynic in me sees this as a money making move, as it means that more incoming students will have to pay more to graduate. I'm really curi…

Dartmouth has a very strong teaching tradition. Certainly not all the professors are good at it. But freshman etc. courses aren't taught by teaching assistants.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#25

Post by protomyth »

roguecoder wrote: post #21
jlarocco wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And get a jump start working on their Bachelor's degrees which now take six years. Seems like the high schools need to add some more rigorous classes for seniors.

A high school degree ought to be good for something. Students are entitled to four years of effective free education. If high schools can't engage them I think the government should be on the hook for the bill for the first year of college.

I would prefer they figure out why High School has become so devalued and fix that. We should respect both the student's time we are requiring and the taxpayers who are paying for a defective product. Buying students a year of college doesn't fix the problem and acknowledges that we wasted their time.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#26

Post by redwood »

It always felt like you were robbing yourself of really interesting college courses if you skipped them due to AP.

I always saw AP as more of a gateway to college due to the prestige/GPA-boost they gave your application, rather than a real way of getting significant college credit.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#27

Post by tokenadult »

The relevant pages on the Dartmouth College website

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/credit_...

http://www.dartmouth.edu/admissions/apply/thinking/credit.ht...

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/advance...

don't appear to be updated to match what is reported in the AP article.

What's really news here is that Dartmouth ever granted credit for AP courses--that is unusual in the Ivy League, of which Dartmouth is one of eight members. On the other hand, there are hundreds upon hundreds of other colleges all around the country that continue to offer AP credit for AP scores on specified tests of a specified level, so each high school student who decides whether or not to take an AP test is deciding to do so based on what colleges the student is considering attending. This is no big deal. Each college decides its own policy. The policy of Harvard

http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&pag...

http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/transfer/tra...

will continue to be different from the policy of (for example) Rutgers,

http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/academic-credit

http://sebs.rutgers.edu/new/aptests.asp

http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/ad...

and students will continue to compare the varied college policies on AP credit

http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_get.htm...

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.j...

among a lot of other trade-offs the students consider when deciding where to attend college, including whether or not they are admitted to the college in the first place.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#28

Post by baddox »

showerst wrote: post #19
adrockdust wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, why will they have more debt than non-AP credited kids?

Not "more debt that non-AP credited kids", "more debt than they otherwise would have if Dartmouth took their AP credits".

Yes, pardon my slight ambiguity there.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#29

Post by InclinedPlane »

jlarocco wrote: post #8
wmf wrote: post #2

If AP classes don't give credit, I wonder if this will lead some students to graduate high school after three years.

And get a jump start working on their Bachelor's degrees which now take six years. Seems like the high schools need to add some more rigorous classes for seniors.

Seems like a high school diploma should guarantee a basic level of competency with literacy, math, and scientific knowledge. 2/3 of first year college students in the US have basic or below basic levels of proficiency with the English language.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#30

Post by maratd »

brudgers wrote: post #11
InclinedPlane wrote: post #5

Maybe the AP system has degraded over the years. When I was in school it helped immensely and I was able to enter college as a mid-year sophomore and graduate early. And the level of material and rigor in AP courses seemed roughly comparable to 100 and 200 level college courses. The cynic in me sees this as a money making move, as it means that more incoming students will have to pay more to graduate. I'm really curi…

From the linked Associated Press article: Rather than award credit for an introductory course to incoming students who got the highest score on the AP test, the department gave those students a condensed version of the Dartmouth course's final exam. Ninety percent failed, Tell said. And when those students went on to take the introductory class, they performed no better than those who did not have the high AP test sc…

In defense of AP tests, they're meant to replace college level courses ... not university level courses. They're equivalent to what you'd encounter at a local community college, not what you'd encounter at the top 100 research universities in the country.
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