I have a question for people who've taken AP classes or whose kids are taking them.
My son signed up for an online AP history class. He ended up asking me to drop him out of it after two weeks because he was miserable. It used an online ebook with online multiple choice quizzes and was almost 100% memorize and regurgitate. Plus (IMO), it was a poster child for the mile-wide/molecule-deep approach. There was really almost no room for measured analysis or consideration of patterns in US history that continue until today. Quiz questions asked things like "What was the response of farmers in Georgia to the
of 1730?"
Essays directions said, "You have 45 minutes to write this." The instructor obviously wasn't looking for anything deep; I think the idea was to train students how to write FAST on the AP exam. From what I learned about the class, passing it and the AP test requires memorizing 400-500 pages of textbook factoids.
I dug into AP classes a bit and found that there's a movement to get away from them (here's a good series of blog entries on the subject).
Personally, I find this very depressing, but, as usual, not surprising. Memorizing a bunch of facts is not how my college professors taught history. They expected us to think about things and write long papers that took 2-3 weeks or more to put together. There was no such thing as a multiple choice test. I know that a lot of colleges rely on these types of tests, but IMO, the good ones use them occasionally at most. All that slow writing I did in all my humanities classes helped me get a perfect score on the essay portion of the GRE, with no preparation. I didn't have to practice by writing lots of rapid-fire essays. All that practice writing complex essays over weeks gave me everything I needed. Somehow, I think that whipping out 45-minute slap-and-dash essays won't teach kids how to spend 3 weeks researching a subject and drawing conclusions from what they've read.
I'd like to know if anyone else has had similar doubts about AP courses. I'm sure that some are better than others (makes sense, and is supported by what I've read). But to me, a course based around multiple choice questions isn't really teaching much of importance.
