It is now common for AP Calculus to be spread over two years, with students taking the Calculus AB exam in one year and the BC exam the following year. Something similar is now being done with Physics B. Advanced Placement courses and exams were created in the 1950s to serve gifted students. Now the audience has shifted, and the courses are being slowed down. I think the
philosophy behind the recently-announced SAT changes and this change is the same.

It is common for high schools to offer a full-year course in biology, chemistry, and physics that students take before they (optionally) take an AP course in those subjects. How many students will have time in their schedules for 3 years of physics?

http://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/math-and-science/physics
Overview of Revisions
AP has implemented key recommendations by replacing AP Physics B with two new courses: AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2.
An in-depth study by the National Research Council (NRC) concluded that AP Physics B is a very broad course that “encourages cursory treatment of important topics in physics” rather than cultivating a deeper understanding of key foundational principles. The NRC further concluded that students should study Newtonian mechanics, including rotational dynamics and angular momentum, topics not covered in AP Physics B.

The NRC also emphasized the need for an instructional approach that supports in-depth, student-led inquiry of topics. To achieve these important goals, and to provide the much-needed time for teachers to accomplish them, the NRC recommended spreading the course material over two years. After confirming this recommendation through college curriculum studies, higher education validations, reviews of state standards, and AP teacher timing trials, the AP Program is replacing AP Physics B with two separate full-year courses.

AP Physics 1: Algebra-Based and AP Physics 2: Algebra-Based debut in fall 2014, followed by the first exam administrations in May 2015.
Students have the time needed to explore and deepen understanding.
Splitting the AP Physics B course into two separate, full-year courses allows students to achieve in-depth understanding. They will have more time for hands-on explorations of physics content and inquiry labs. The full year also allows time for inclusion of physics content specified by state standards.

I agree that AP Physics B is a mile-wide, inch-deep, rigorous=more homework disaster.

I'm very dubious about "student led inquiry," though. It's always struck me as being a fuzzy approach to science. Students can't "lead" when they don't really know anything about the subject material, which is pretty much how we define those enrolled in introductory-level courses. Oh, the poorly controlled studies I have reviewed in this area.

I swear, this stuff gets dreamed up by people who have some kind of romantic idea that you can take magical shortcuts to knowledge or innovation by just turning high school students or college freshmen loose in a lab.

I agree.

Frankly, AP Physics B being offered in a 2y period is ridiculous. That would have made that course completely unsuitable for my DD or most of her classmates. Admittedly, those would be the classmates that finished the year-- the five of them, I mean, not the 20 who STARTED the course in the fall.

However, it's ludicrous to think that students "can't learn it" that fast. Clearly some of them bloody well CAN learn it that fast. I watched it happen. With two of them, no less-- my DD and one of her best friends both thoroughly enjoyed the pace of AP Physics.
Their other three classmates are acing full STEM courseloads at prestigious institutions this year-- and by "prestigious" I mean Vassar, UChi, and Princeton. All four (my DD not among them) who took the AP exam got 5's. They all clearly belonged in the course, clearly understood what they were doing, and were learning the material-- yes, even at that pace. But maybe that class just isn't intended for "average" college-bound high school students, if you see my point.

I'd rather that AP courses remained a bit "elitist" in this respect, because the alternative is a dismal wasteland for HG+ students in an average high school setting.



As for student led inquiry at the basic level in the sciences... just... well, something about monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare comes to mind, quite frankly.

I agree. I generally dislike the who idea of "inquiry-based learning."

If it isn't going at the pace of a college class, then it shouldn't be considered equivalent to a college class in the sense that students taking it aren't necessarily demonstrating their ability to do college level work.

My son is taking calculus at college this year. The first quarter covered most of what's in AB. The second quarter covered what's in BC. What is covered in the third quarter isn't even in the AP courses. But even the BC course isn't going at a college level pace (20 weeks vs 36 weeks).

I agree, Kai. The AP classes that actually DO move at a college pace are less common than they once were, that's for sure.

DD's statistics course, for example, is effectively a one-quarter 200-level stats class, taught over the course of 30 weeks. So it's 1/3rd the pace.

So, is it the class or the test result that qualifies for college credit?

The test. Unless it's a course which qualifies as dual enrollment (and that is the only route that we actually allow for college credit-- but that is just us).

One idea that occurs to me about pacing is that college students usually take a load of four full-credit courses per semester. High school students may have 6 or 7 classes. Given that some of these kids may be taking 3 or 4 AP classes at one time, plus all those other classes, it honestly doesn't seem reasonable to me to expect the classes to move at the pace of a real college class.

As an example, the high school people here have told us that dual enrollment kids here get three times the credits for real college classes. This seems to be saying, "We know it's a lot more work, so you don't have to take as many classes at the high school." I took AP classes in the early 80s when those classes were a lot closer to college-level. The workload per course was nothing compared to what I had as a college freshman.

And for full disclosure, I think that AP classes have become something of a racket in many ways.

I don't have a problem with the AP tests counting for college credit. My issue is with the idea that a student taking AP courses is unequivocally demonstrating an ability to do college work.

There is a huge difference between how AP (and IB) classes are taught and how real college classes are taught, and not just the pacing. AP/IB classes work like regular high school classes in that they have lots of assignments (and therefore lots of stuff to grade). Generally AP/IB teachers are scaffolding instruction more and giving students more input on studying the material (hence all those grades). In a college class, frequently the only grades are the midterm and the final. There are no assignments that are intended to help the students study the material (such as "read the section, answer the questions at the end, and hand them in"). The students are expected to do whatever it takes to learn the material.

I agree that high school has its own set of challenges with juggling 6-7 courses and that having 3-4 of those be AP courses can be very difficult, but it is still not the same thing as dealing with an actual college course.

Agreed-- and the level of instruction is different.

Although I will also say that college courses vary ENORMOUSLY in terms of how much work is graded/submitted. Many STEM classes do still have graded homework or lab work associated.

Every class I ever taught had at least 20 graded assignments in it. At least. Some had as many as 100 over the course of a 16 week semester.


I didn't know anyone that had fewer than five, and most of those people had some kind of safety net for a student that missed one of those (or just plain tanked on the day, iykwim).

I'd also say that it really depends on the AP course. My DD's AP courses have all had far, far LESS instructional scaffolding than she will expect from college coursework. In fact, the expectations and requirements are quite similar. She has teachers that she hasn't even exchanged a sentence with all semester. Her AP Stats teacher, for example, never has class (he just doesn't), refers students to youTube and Khan, and communicates 99% via e-mail in one-sentence statements. It's the equivalent of being a student in an 8 am class with 200 people in it.

Most of my 1st/2nd year humanities classes in college involved writing weekly essays. The junior/senior-level ones required longer essays (20+ pages), and we usually had to write 2 per semester. We had to hand in lab reports every week for science courses. I remember weekly problem sets in science and math courses. It was more work than I had in high school, and expectations were higher.

In my STEM courses in college, we had weekly problem sets that were checked but not counted towards the grade. There was a midterm or two and a final and those were the only things that were graded.

In my non-STEM courses, we usually had a few shorter papers assigned as well as a longer final paper and that was it.

My son's college courses are somewhat more high schoolish than mine were (homework is graded and counted in his calculus class, for example) but they are far less high schoolish than his IB courses were.