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AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

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Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#31

Post by cschneid »

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.

My girlfriend teaches high school. Another teacher there teaches a class sponsored by a local community college.

The curriculum is strict, and the teacher needs a masters to qualify. And then the kids end up with real college credit.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#32

Post by shrughes »

maratd wrote: post #30
brudgers wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not what "college" means in the United States. "College" is a synonym with "University." There is sometimes some word usage where the connotations can be different, but rarely, and in particular, there's no difference in the notion of "university level courses" and "college level courses."

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#33

Post by koenigdavidmj »

danteembermage wrote: post #10
kevinburke wrote: post #6

The AP gradations are useless. If I remember right the calculus exam has about 120 possible points and you only need about a 56 to score a 5.

I took an exam where the median score is typically zero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemati...

Also the subject of the funniest HN thread ever:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#34

Post by andrewchoi »

As a current student at an Ivy League school, it's interesting to see that this is getting much backlash now. My school hasn't accepted AP credit for a while now, and it's never been a problem. Students grouse superficially, but for the most part, it's understood that they're just prerequisities to get in to the schools you want to go to.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#35

Post by StevenXC »

College math instructor here; I've taught Calculus III for the past three years. I always feel bad for my freshman students, particularly those in the fall semester. Some of them are prepared, and some aren't, but almost none of them have a mature understanding of mathematics that we expect in a sophomore-level course.

The problem with AP from my observation (at least in math) is that it encourages teaching the test. I'm certain many of them have never seen \lim_{h->0}\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h} before, so how can they suddenly expect to understand the limit definition of a partial derivative either?

I took a Calculus course in high school, skipped on taking the AP test, and then took an honors section of Cal I when I got to college to get a deeper understanding (and an easy first-semester A). I feel I made the best decision.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#36

Post by andrewchoi »

tokenadult wrote: post #27

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…

This was my first reaction as well, Princeton also does not offer credit for AP classes:

http://www.princeton.edu/pub/ap/

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#37

Post by brodney »

rayiner wrote: post #7

AP credits have never been a particularly great ROI. My wife went the different route of signing up for classes at the local community college. You get a lot more out of them (in the rush to keep up with the joneses, high school administrators are calling everything "AP" these days), and also colleges are quite willing to accept those credits for lower-level classes.

My high school offered a joint enrollment with a nearby public university. Taking my senior year there was by far the best decision I made in high school, and way more illuminating and engaging than if I had signed up for all AP courses.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#38

Post by ghshephard »

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…

You know what I'd like to see - is a second study, in which students who got the highest scores on the Dartmouth course, with the same interval of delay also take that same final exam.

I was surprised at the number of fellow students at my University who openly admitted that within a month or two of the final exam, they couldn't recall much of anything about some of the courses in which they had scored an A or higher in.

It's entirely possible that the issue isn't the AP courses, but the significant delay taking (and doing well in the course) - and retesting again.

Alternatively - take a student from another Ivy League, Yale, Harvard - and see how they would do on a Dartmouth Final exam with some delay between taking the course and testing out again.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#39

Post by InclinedPlane »

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…

Interesting. I wonder how much the trend of "teaching to the test" has infected the AP program.

Re: AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

#40

Post by brianchu »

tokenadult wrote: post #27

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…

On the contrary, it is actually very common for Ivy League schools to offer AP credit, or at the least allow you to use AP credit to fulfill a requirement / prerequisite. Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania all offer AP credit or allow fulfilling prerequisites. Outside of the Ivy League, Stanford offers AP credit. MIT offers AP credit for 2 classes and elective credit for humanities AP classes.

None of these schools, however, will offer AP credit for all AP classes, since there is a lot of variability in the rigor of each AP class. Three of the AP classes that I've observed tend to be accepted for credit are BC Calculus, Physics C, and Economics. Physics C (for Mechanics and Electricity) was the most challenging AP test I ever took.

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