Most non-gifted high school students have no business in these courses-- if, that is, they are as they are intended/purported to be. The pace and the expectations are simply beyond them.
To say that is to open a Pandora's box. If it is true, and if AP courses represent college level work, then "most non-gifted high school students have no business" trying to get a bachelor's degree, either, except that many employers use the BA effectively as a high school diploma.
There is a HUGE difference between an 11th grader and a college freshman that has nothing to do with age or maturity.
The largest single difference is the expectation of
course loads.My daughter has eight classes this semester. Yes,
8.She was truly freaked out last December by the concept that in just 18 months "all of my classes will be like Physics and Lit." Well, yes-- but the reality is that they won't all 'count' the same way that the goofy credit system in high school places these things. (Every semester of every class is a "half Carnegie unit" which is just stupid.)
Okay-- so looking at her course load in terms of a quarter-system college schedule:
Physics w/ Lab-- 4 credit hours
English Literature-- 3-4 credit hours
Social Science course-- 3 credit hours
US History-- 3 credit hours
Foreign language-- 3-4 credit hours
fluffy elective 1-- 1-3 hours
Non-fluffy elective 2-- 2-3 hours
Anyone else seeing what I'm saying here?
NO advisor would sign off on this kind of schedule for a freshman student, and precious few even for a senior student who needed the courses to graduate. In fact, it's nearly
double a full course load for a college student.
The top four, there, are all AP/Honors. When I pointed out to DD that just those four would be considered a "full" course load for a college student, she looked at me like I had three heads. "Really? I thought that college was supposed to be HARD," she said. LOL.
The thing is, most high school students
cannot cope (and really, should not be able to) with a full course load as high schools define it (6 courses or more).... AND the addition of AP coursework. In any college setting, 6 'regular' classes (that is, not including something like a 1-2hr lab section or seminar class meeting once weekly) is an overload.
The load balancing needed to manage AP in high school is a matter of time management and working LONGER (not necessarily "harder") whereas the balancing needed by college students is often something quite different in terms of the task complexity required in the work itself.
Of course AP doesn't do much to prepare the average high schooler. Instead, those classes
may simply encourage such students to imagine that working longer hours = better grades, and it doesn't. At least not in college it doesn't.
It's also worth noting that most college faculty would have argued the point about AP being truly equal to college level work even as long as 20 years ago. They'd have been right, incidentally, and it certainly hasn't gotten better in the interim. We're
very careful about which AP courses our DD chooses, and much depends on the teachers in charge of them. She's not taking them because they are college "level" but because they are at least college
work-load and intensity, and because while her classmates are in survival mode, she learns rapidly enough to actually tolerate the pace very well and be authentically learning the material that most of her classmates are struggling to remember well enough to pass assessments. I realize that sounds elitist/dismissive, and I'm not really suggesting that. This 'mile-wide-and-inch-deep' problem is well-documented re: AP and Val and I have dicussed it at length. AP is a good fit in some ways for HG+ kids, and bad in others, but at least it allows her to frame deeper autodidactic learning. Frankly, with good instruction, AP calculus would be on the table for her, since her largest problem with math has always been the pacing of instruction.
Can we agree that she is not-not-not "most" kids, however?
I see her classmates (mostly bright-to-MG) and they are
ragged in the face of the demands in those same classes.
