By Bryce Liao, Courier Managing Editor
AP exam scores have been falling increasingly over the past few years at Logan.
At the start of the school year, principal Abhi Brar held a meeting with all AP teachers to discuss ways to improve the current situation. The teachers noted that some classes experienced dramatic increases in the number of students, but more students did not pass.
Typically, a full length AP High School course teaches a year’s worth of College-level material, and traditional restrictions have barred a number of students from taking these challenging AP courses. However, in recent years, the number of AP students has been increasing dramatically, partly due to the open enrollment policy.
Ms Nguyen, an AP Calculus AB teacher, says, “Open enrollment has given students more opportunities to take higher level classes, and also more opportunities to take AP exams. This seems good at first, but it opens the gate to students who maybe [have not] fully met the prerequisites for the class.”
An anonymous student agrees with that idea, stating, “Open enrollment results in classes filled with incompetent students and dilutes the difficulty and ‘advanced’ status of the class. This obviously lowers the average score as not everyone has the ability to learn, retain, and study material for the AP test.”
An interesting correlation between AP scores and class grades showed that some students did not have As in the class, but still aced the AP exam, while other students with high grades did not pass the AP Exam. This suggests the possibility of classes not exactly aligned with the AP test, causing some students to sacrifice their class grade in order to self-study more relevant material.
Another anonymous student, commenting on the relevance of the AP class to the AP test, said, “After spending a number of years at Logan, the only AP teacher that I have had who seems to care about the AP scores of his students and prepares his students accordingly is the AP Calculus BC teacher, Ken Prucha. I believe that AP teachers should be evaluated based on their AP scores in order to create a sense of urgency that distinguishes an AP class from a regular class.”
Not all the AP scores are dropping, though. At Logan, AP Biology is one of the only courses whose AP scores have gone up, with 1 in 5 students getting a 5 on last year’s AP test.
Mrs Childers, the AP Biology teacher, states, “I attribute the improving scores to utilizing interactive notebooks, encouraging organization and reflection, and emphasizing concise answers. I often assign my students writing tasks in an essay format similar to that of the AP test FRQs, and give lab and poster projects.”
Surprisingly, Mrs Childers does not blame open enrollment too much. She claims that many students can handle the AP Biology workload, and that the way the class prepares kids for the AP Exam is a much more important factor in AP scores.
Still, the percentage of students getting 3+ on AP exams has fallen from 71% to 58% in the past 5 years. In the meantime, we hope that the vast array of suggestions from teachers and students on how to improve AP scores can help turn around the falling trend.