Our high school-aged babysitter was over last night. She told us that our local public highs school, which is top 10% in California, now limits kids to 8 AP or honors classes for all of high school. Apparently the University of California schools only consider 8 to add extra points to their GPA.
She was shut out of 2 AP classes this year and was very upset.
My kids are only in elementary school. However, I'm curious if others have seen this and what your thoughts are. The school district did it to make high school less stressful for the kids.

Our high school only allows kids to take APs in their junior and senior years, which in theory would limit them to 12 given that there are six periods.

I imagine they must also pull football players once they've played in six winning games, and never let sophomores play on the varsity teams.

If our football players weren't pulled until they won six games, football players would be in HS for 7 or 8 years.

The 8 AP class limit troubles me less than the 8 AP or Honors mentioned by the OP (at least if Honors there works the same way it works here). They may have a lot of kids "gaming" the GPA thing by taking more weighted courses and finding ways to take unweighted ones pass/fail (such as online health class or a "summer school" PE class). Some kids actually do this so they have a good shot at valedictorian.

I must be missing something

Summer school PE is somewhat common here (Northwest suburbs of Chicago)for the very reason you mentioned.

MOST schools have a sort of de facto limit on AP since they have "prerequisites" (often mandating that a student have spent a year in the "prep" course covering the material prior to tackling the AP version*), that only junior or senior students can enroll in AP, that no student may take more than two or three at once, etc. etc.

* and frankly, how in the heck are students supposed to TAKE all of those prerequisite courses, all of the different graduation requirements, AND fit in AP, I'd like to know?

Anyway.

Yes-- kids game the system for GPA points. On the other hand, it does you no good at all to take three AP classes unless you get A's in them, if you KWIM.

They are harder than the standard/honors courses, if only because of the rate and workload.

DD will graduate having taken just 4 full-year AP classes. It's all she's had time for, frankly-- in light of the silly prerequisite thing, I mean.

On the other hand, limiting honors/college prep coursework seems bad, bad, bad to me. She's taken about 14 of those.

Actually, I now see that everything I wrote above is invalid. Was dog tired when I read the OP last night. I obviously do not understand the system here. Now you put it like that, i.e. 8 total over 4 years it is woefully low - I misread the original post as concern over limiting things to 8 AP classes in the senior year. Sorry about that I have deleted my earlier post.

I guess I thought there would be more outrage on this chat site- people are outraged when their first grader can't bring in books from home to read. Our public school offers for AP classes for STEM kids: AP physics, biology, chemistry, AB calculus, BC calculus, and statistic. That is 6 right there. Then if you take two years of a foreign language AP, what about- US history, art history, etc?
I just don't see how/why they would limit these kind of classes if kids are qualified to take them and want to take them. I got a year of college credit from the 3 AP tests I took, way back when, which allowed me to graduate from my private university early and save a lot of money!
Our babysitter was in tears because her GPA is "only" a 4.00 and she doesn't think she will get into any of our UC state schools! They wouldn't let her take 4 AP classes her senior year, only two.

Well, but that's the catch, see-- LOTS of parents pressuring schools to let their kids take more-more-more of these prep/AP classes, but then complaining about the rigor once they get into them.

Technically, AP courses ARE supposed to be both WAY more work and WAY faster. College level, right?

So I understand placing barriers to keep out the kids who truly shouldn't be in them due to not being able to keep up with the pace or output expectations-- and to keep the level of instruction appropriately high, which has quite frankly become quite a problem in the AP program during the last ten years or so...

the problem with "AP for all" is that it turns into an AP free-for-all, if you see what I mean. Parents want kids to be earning good grades and passing AP tests. Otherwise, they figure, what is the point?

I consider that attitude about any class to be something of an abomination-- because it leads straight down the rabbit-hole to "test-prep-land."

Which is exactly what AP has become in all too many cases. Because there are too many kids in those classes now that have no real business in them (that is, if you NEED to take a full year of "physics" before tackling AP Physics B, uhhhhh-- maybe AP isn't for you, YK?) they devolve into test-prep vehicles to keep butts in seats.

So-- easier work. Check. (Busywork, as it happens). LOTS of it... because that way we can still claim adequate "rigor" in the curriculum... see, look how hard the students must work in our AP offerings... (like hamsters running on wheels, but hey...)

Test preparation-- check, again.

Deep understanding? Er-- only inadvertently for most students. Faster pacing-- suuuuuuuure... an inch deep and ten miles wide equals... a hydrofoil.

Please don't misunderstand my post above. That's simply the reality of AP for most courses these days. It's not to say that students like our kids can't use them to learn material at that genuinely high level.

My DD most certainly did use Physics that way. She's also used Literature that way, and similarly with (now) statistics and composition... it's just that it isn't required in order to earn an A and get a 5 on the AP exam at the end of it all.

OUR expectation is that she WILL engage deeply with the material presented and master it. At least the curriculum allows for that and (mostly) doesn't punish it the way some standard high school offerings do. So AP still is a pretty good idea for HG+ kids. It's just that they aren't typical students in those classes, and they may well be irritated with the amount of busywork involved.

I do think that kids ought to be allowed into AP on some kind of different basis than seems to be the case in a lot of districts. Too many kids who don't have any history of that kind of ability are in them, and also far too many high-ability kids ARE NOT, because they can't stomach taking a year of the "regular" class prior to the AP offering.

(That seems to be most common in APUSH and AP science classes.)

Kids who are suited to AP don't need two passes at that material to learn it, and the ones who aren't probably won't find even that adequate. Gaaaa.

Well, I don't think that is happening in our district, which like kcab's doesn't use weighted GPA. The AP pre-requisites are there, but not in the same material/subject (ie, you need to do well in the previous science class, but certainly not take the same subject previously). I assume the kids taking these courses are there for the rigor, if you excuse my use of this tired term. There are college-credit alternatives on the high school campus, which are generally considered to be at a lower level than the AP equivalent, as well as standard level classes. And most colleges here don't offer credit for AP classes anyway; sometimes you place out of the intro course, but if you want credits you end up taking the college-level alternative.

I definitely see what you mean there. I think that weighting GPA's, while a good idea in theory (that is, it rewards the RIGOR in the transcript with appropriate class ranking), it seems to ultimately incentivize the kinds of shenanigans that I'm referring to.

DD isn't taking AP to boost her GPA or to "look" any particular way to colleges. She's taking them because they come closest to her needs academically during her years in high school. I feel quite strongly that this is the only really legitimate reason for taking AP. I realize that is just my opinion, and that many parents think that improving competitiveness or shortening time to a bachelor's degree is also a good reason.

It frustrates me that because of the incentives provided by grade weighting, though, there are additional barriers/limitations placed in the way of taking them. This happens in order to simultaneously disincentivize parents from seeking "too many" AP classes for their kids. My problem with that is that it effectively penalizes kids whose most appropriate placement is AP.

DD should have taken World Civ and US history both as AP, but I just didn't feel like arguing the way around the prerequisites. If I had, though, she would rank higher in her class than she does. We've made some conscious decisions along the way to not "seek competitive advantage" there, however, when such a thing conflicts with OTHER authentic goals in some way.

I say that not because of sour grapes (honestly, high school just hasn't been that hard for DD-- nor time-consuming)... but because it's kind of insane, the level to which this Tiger-Parenting frenzy has all gone. It's kind of poisonous. (IMO, again.)

Excuse my ignorance but I don't know all this AP stuff works. So you can take an AP course at high school and they give you a grade? But you can also take an AP exam that is totally separate from the high school, and they also give you a grade? So you can just one of these, or you can do both? Which one really counts?

It depends on what you mean by "counts."

AP exam score-- possible college credit, though that will depend upon the score achieved on the AP exam (which is taken via College Board on a single date in the spring, and costs $ to sit for). Some elite colleges in particular offer placement only, and some not even that. It's also possible that elite schools will favor students who report 5's (basically, top scores) on AP tests, but few say that they will/do. Anyone can register for and take an AP exam-- College Board really doesn't care whether or not you've taken a class. Rather like the Bar Exam or SAT that way.

AP class grade-- may/may not be "weighted" so that an "A" in that class gets averaged into a student's GPA as a 4.5 or a 5.0 (instead of 4.0 the way most A grades do) in terms of the high school GPA. Colleges do like to see top grades in AP coursework. They like to see AP coursework since that is often a mark of students who aren't trying to "pad" a GPA by taking fluff. Some AP courses require that students sit for the corresponding AP exam. Others do not.

As if that weren't complicated enough already, some high schools may have dual enrollment arrangements with local community colleges or universities, whereby an AP course can be directly taken for college credit-- earning both a high school grade and a the same time, a college grade with a regular transcript and everything.

When I went to college...most of my classes had 4 grades...usually 2 exams (sometimes only one midterm), a paper, and a comprehensive final. Some classes might have one additional grade (maybe a presentation, maybe some other strange thing, possibly a second paper).

Now I don't think that an AP class should be run that way because when I took AP History I needed tons of practice learning how to give an acceptable answer to a DBQ (document based question) or straight essay question and there is so much material to cover so I do think ample opportunity is needed to practice writing a good answer. But all the super duper busy work assignments are silly if you are trying to say the class is comparable to college...college has NO busy work assignments (if you want to make note cards you do but they aren't graded).

Kcab- you may be right. The policy is new this year, but supposedly you can petition to get the classes you want anyway. Our babysitter said she did that but couldn't get the two she wanted. Our school board of education is trying very hard to eliminate our excellent self-contained gifted program, and most people see this as just another thing along the way. Our state UCs are messed up- overcrowded, underfunded, etc...

Our local HS permits students to take as many APs as desired... which is only limited by the fact that the HS only offers 8. Well, actually 9, but you have to provide your own transportation to a different HS each day for the one AP not offered at our HS.

And just to make sure that they really stick it to the higher achievers, if you do manage to take that 9th AP class, it will count as though you had taken another class of PE or finger-painting with respect to the Quest for Valedictorian. Only the 1st 8 AP classes count as AP.

The 9th (& above) APs still get A=5 weighting for GPA purposes, but class ranking for Valedictorian, etc., is based on a system that assigns a point value for each class taken.

Getting an A in an AP class earns you 10 points, an A in normal college prep is 7 points, an A in regular class is 4 points. It's actually a decent system in that it avoids the nonsense where kids (parents?) figure out a way to skip PE, etc., in order to inflate their GPA as compared to kids to could not find a way to skip a class.

The system stinks for the kid who takes a 9th AP and gets a B. That B, now just a regular B, is worth 2 points toward class rank. But the kid who took Basket Weaving instead of APUSH and got an A will get 4 points, and the kid who took College-Prep Basket Weaving would get 7 points for his A.
(There's no limit on College Prep courses -- only AP.)

Way to encourage the kids! Yay!

In my naïveté I had assumed that college prep classes were harder than AP classes offered by a given school the first time that I heard them mentioned - PC doublespeak at its worst.

In most American schools, difficulty is (roughly)

standard < honors/college prep < AP/IB < dual-enrollment (college credit course) < college course.

Unfortunately, that's not really standard either, and there are instances in which the honors course or some other accelerated thing is actually MORE difficult/rigorous than the AP option. But that seems to be somewhat rare.


Agreed.


I also had to chuckle at Dandy's wry observations. Our HS has a similar outlook on things, evidently-- because if you take an actual COLLEGE class, they'll give you credit for differential equations or whatever else you take... 400-level biology? Sure! Counts towards your GPA just like freshman PE.

LOL.

They justify this by stating that they can't offer a GPA weight for a class of "unknown" quality. (Yes, really-- and what's even more amazing is that the administrator managed that plum without even bursting out laughing or anything...)

Sounds like the same (rather sensible, I think) advice we eventually went to.

No amount of GPA boost was going to be worth suffering through Honors Chem with the biology Harpy, for example. LOL.