1. Quality ain't what it used to be. Not by a long shot. So those not-so-rigorous classes with less writing also don't ask students to produce much in the way of excellence, either... and even less so now.
2. More is just more, not better. It's not that the quality expectations are SO much better in AP, actually. Appallingly.
AP students are taught--specifically-- to tackle the kinds of multiple choice items which will appear on AP exams. Yes. They spend class time on this now. As opposed to cranking out acceptable quality essays.
Oh yes. That AP History class my DS dropped after 2 weeks was full of practice for the AP exam. The most egregious examples were
the amazing forty-minute lightning essays. The kids would get a topic and were told to write about it for 40 minutes. No sources or footnotes allowed. Just keep writing!!
The instructor left my son and I on his mailing list for the whole year. I just looked through his messages and saw that the class covered World War II and the Cold War in a single week. The assignment for those topics was the same as it always was every week: read the chapters and take the multiple choice tests. Passing the tests required memorizing the kinds of picayune details that are fodder for MC test questions. Talk about needing fortitude to get through it! Blech.
Looking back on my own AP classes in the 80s, the stuff we did in Calculus was a reasonable approximation of college-level material. And Mr. W. never gave a multiple choice test. English was not even close to the college writing courses I took the next year. European history was somewhere in between --- but it was
much better than the model in the AP US History class my son dropped. Again, no multiple choice tests and there was an expectation to cite our sources in papers.
In thinking about how these classes work now, calling them "college level" is really something of a sad joke. They aren't. They're...kind of more of a business model for the testing and test prep industries.
