The College Board admits their Advance Placement exams suck.

[pnwmom]

but they promise the new ones will be better:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/edlife/09ap-t.html?pagewanted=1

“As A.P. has proliferated, spreading to more than 30 subjects with 1.8 million students taking 3.2 million tests, the program has won praise for giving students an early chance at more challenging work. But many of the courses, particularly in the sciences and history, have also been criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics. Students and educators alike say that biology, with 172,000 test-takers this year, is one of the worst offenders.

SNIP

“A.P. teachers have long complained that lingering for an extra 10 or 15 minutes on a topic can be a zero-sum game, squeezing out something else that needs to be covered for the exam. PowerPoint lectures are the rule. The homework wears down many students. And studies show that most schools do the same canned laboratory exercises, providing little sense of the thrill of scientific discovery.
“All that, says the College Board, is about to change.
“Next month, the board, the nonprofit organization that owns the A.P. exams as well as the SAT, will release a wholesale revamping of A.P. biology as well as United States history — with 387,000 test-takers the most popular A.P. subject. A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students’ minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. In biology, a host of more creative, hands-on experiments are intended to help students think more like scientists.”

More at link above.

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And even if the new tests are better, don’t expect AP science classes to be as good as taking actual college classes:

“Studies indicate that relatively few high schools have laboratories equivalent to those used in first-year college courses. Professor Uno says that the new A.P. lab experiments will rely mostly on the same equipment as the old ones, and that program designers will provide “some low-cost alternatives where we can.”

[9119495]

1. I teach an AP class. The exams will not change (much)

The AP World History Test Development Committee rolled out a wonderful new test format privileging higher-order thinking skills and tried to deemphasize rote memorization. It was awesome...

and then a bunch of teachers on the AP World History Discussion Board moderated by the College Board freaked out because it was going to be a change. Within 72 hours, they pulled the planned revisions from the website. Guess what happened next?

4 months later they announced there would be no changes to the exam.

The College Board will try to establish a veneer of change, not actual change.

[pnwmom]

2. That's a shame. But I guess not a big surprise.

I can't blame overworked teachers for reacting the way they did.

My district, which spends a fraction per student as most good districts in the midwest and east, consistently gets put on Newsweek's list of top high schools. Why? Because our superintendent required ALL students at every level to take the tests -- because that's the only data point Newsweek uses in ranking schools. (You don't have to pass the test, just take it.)

Then other districts across the country figured out this trick, and soon they were pushing the tests, too. So our superintendent tried to require all our high school students to take 5 AP classes and tests in order to graduate from high school. What a racket.

I guess I should be happy that at least someone's making money from this, right? All this test-taking must be stimulating the economy, at the very least.

:sarcasm:

[9119495]

3. Don't forget the College Board is no longer a non-profit...

And unfortunately, I would argue these teachers resistant to change were underworked. They are the type that lecture three days a week, give students a workday, and test on Friday. They could have been fostering real learning with the new format. The approach would require more teacher guidance though not much more work.