Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Current norms for GT & AP, etc.

Momtofour, College Board did a major overhaul on the AP Bio exam two years ago. That is why there are fewer 5s - they made the test harder (though my kid thought the MC was really easy, much easier than the old tests).

College Board also changed the foreign language tests a few years back - eldest took French prior to the change and German after (said the tests were very different, as you now need to know about culture, geography, etc.).

So the recent changes in score distributions are likely due to changes in the tests (and kids perhaps not being familiar with the new formats, as there aren't that many practice materials available).

Ah-ha, that makes sense! I was out of the HS loop for a good many years (8-year gap between 2nd and 3rd child) so with #3 just starting HS this year, I've been unaware of changes. Thanks for the update. Hope there will be practice materials if/when he takes it!

What I have noticed is that much of the curriculum in all the major subjects (math, science, reading, language arts, social studies) have been "pushed down". I would venture to say that most elementary students (in decent schools) are covering topics formerly introduced in middle school while most middle school students (in decent schools) are covering topics formerly introduced in high school. This is most obvious in math where first graders get questions like 5 + ? = 14, second graders get to create bar graphs and third graders are asked to calculate the area of a rectangle, etc. In the science area, I actually see a lot of coverage of topics in biology, physics and environmental science between 3rd to 5th grade. I think that by the time students get to high school, they actually have studied quite a bit of biology, chemistry and physics, certainly enough to handle an environmental science course without high school biology, chemistry & physics. In our district, it looks like AP Environmental Science would typically come after GT or Honors courses in Biology, Chemistry & Physics so presumably sufficient preparation for a college level course same as the other AP Science courses.

I definitely see that the curriculum is tougher at the middle schools than back in my day. It just seem to me that a lot of skills/knowledge are pushed down into the lower grades but by the end of high school, there generally isn't a whole lot more to show for it.

It would also be clearer if the curriculum is more uniform so that the same names actually mean the same topics. It wasn't until I had a discussion with DS' algebra teacher that I realized there is such huge variations in just the coverage for Algebra I. Interestingly, I found one document online that references our district's AP Calculus AB course as Calculus I, II and our AP Calculus BC course as Calculus III with the idea that a student could place out of the first three semester of college Calculus whereas AP Calculus BC is traditionally a test on mastery of topics covered during the first two semesters of college calculus.

I wonder if the AP World scores are relatively low because the test takers are predominantly Freshmen or Sophomores rather than Juniors and Seniors.

Simple-- it's a survey course. A mile wide, and an inch deep.

It's no more rigorous than the general education science courses that I used to teach to students from all over the campus.

Then again, that's what you have to bear in mind about most AP coursework-- it's at that Gen Ed level, with a few exceptions.


And I agree, Quantum-- there isn't much to show that spiraling like this actually produces good results in the end. But that's what I think it is-- so it's not exactly that higher level content is being pushed downward. Well, it sort of is, I guess. But without genuine mastery of the foundation, for most students (even bright ones) it just can't stick.


It's like trying to paint a teflon building by racing around it in a clown-car spraying a mixture of paint on the walls at each pass with a firehose mounted on the car. IMO, it seems more effective to prepare the surface well and do it meticulously, but the cartoon clown-car approach is a lot more exciting and certainly LOOKS more impressive.


(You're welcome, btw. I dare anyone not to crack a smile and think of that metaphor when encountering an earnest clow-- er-- educator-administrator espousing the wonders of spiraling pedagogy. )

You know, I am actually conflicted about this spiraling approach. On the one hand, I don't much care for it personally. On the other hand, it has eased the way to acceleration for a certain type of high ability student. In elementary math, the arithmetic (numbers) topics are pretty intuitive/instinctive and can easily be picked up from day-to-day living but some of the elementary algebra, elementary geometry and elementary statistics topics require some minimal exposure at least to terminology and basic principles. I believe that the end-of-year tests several grades up were easy for DS even in 2nd grade partly due to this spiraling approach. DS had not been tutored or taken through any outside curriculum prior to the testing for his first acceleration in 2nd grade.

Why do they call it "spiraling"? I wonder if these people don't know the difference between a spiral and a helix.

Now I could understand calling it "spiraling out of control".

I should have written this a few pages earlier in this thread but looking over the course description it seems like alot of time per subject vs. the old version of 1 year of biology, 1 year of chemistry, 1 year of physics at whatever level was appropriate. What are you trading off if you have to take 2 years of physics and chemistry etc.?

That reminds me of another difference that I have noticed. In my day, you needed 20 credits to graduate. Most normal students taking a standard load would have 24 credits. GT students would automatically have more due to high school credits from middle school. At our local high school, which has alternate day schedule, the standard load would result in 32 credits although you still only need 20 credits to graduate even if there are about that many in total required courses alone. So in answer to Ben leis, I am not sure that you are giving up anything since there is room for more courses.

Precisely our question when we told DD's high school that they were out of their minds if they thought she was going to take "honors" coursework as PREPARATION for the same subject offered as an AP course.

(And in contrast to Quantum's experience, there are only so many periods in the school day, and students are NOT PERMITTED to exceed a certain number of courses per term-- usually 7 or 8-- plus, there are a mandated 24 credits for graduation, and that's the state. So there isn't a lot of wiggle room-- DD graduated with 28 credits, I think, which is VERY high.)


Their answer was fairly interesting, actually-- that this is the "general" recommendation for most students now, but that it "Obviously would be waived for a student like {HK DD}," and the implication was fairly clear-- she is the kind of student who can exell in an AP course without much in the way of handholding or spiraling (as preparation). Most of the students that are "AP" students aren't.

Even so, it was interesting to note the attrition rate in DD's AP coursework-- in the six that she took, the attrition rate was 50% or more. In some of them, it was significantly higher. Physics, for example, started with 22 students, I think? By May, there were only five of them left. IMHO, the five who actually belonged in that class. Of those five, only three of them bothered with the AP exam, but all of them got 5's.

My conclusion based upon that is that in spite of all of the spiraling in the world, AP coursework is still a lot more than most high school students can manage very well. Maybe even fewer of them than in previous generations, in fact.