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Posing tougher questions about the Advanced Placement program.

Article Excerpt
THE COLLEGE BOARD'S Advanced Placement (AP) program began in the middle of the twentieth century through the convergence of two separate but parallel efforts, both funded by the Ford Foundation, to find a means to enhance the educational experience of high-achieving high school students. Until very recently, the AP program has been above reproach; it has enjoyed a strong reputation as the most rigorous means of accelerating the learning of precocious high school students. Over the past decade, however, the explosive 10 percent annual growth in the number of students participating in the program has raised questions about its role in education (Lichten 2000). Few doubt the integrity of the program itself, but doubts have been raised about how the AP label and examination scores are being used (Geiser and Santelices 1999).

The profile of the AP program was raised significantly in 2006, when President Bush singled it out in his State of the Union address as an important mechanism for reinvigorating the growth of the U.S. science and technology workforce (National Science Board 2008). The role of the AP program in the president's American Competitiveness Initiative is to increase the number of high school graduates entering the "science pipeline," the academic and professional pathway leading to work at the cutting edge of science and technology. The $122 million initiative is aimed, in part, at broadening the accessibility of the AP program for underserved and underrepresented groups across the United States.

In the news media, coverage of the AP program is often muddled by discussions that interweave college admissions decisions with the granting of college coursework credit. In my view, there are actually three groupings for Advanced Placement issues: high school AP courses and their role in college admissions, AP exams and college course credit, and issues of access and equity.

AP courses and college admissions

What do high school students taking AP courses experience? What content is included in the courses? For the first time since the inception of the AP program, the College Board conducted a worldwide audit of AP course syllabi in 2007-8. This effort involved 839 college professors who reviewed more than 134,000 syllabi from more than 14,000 high schools. On average, each professor reviewed 160 high school course syllabi.

Yet while syllabi may indicate what content is taught, they offer little or no evidence of how content is taught. When considering the quality of courses, content is only part of the question. Other factors of comparable or even greater importance include the instructional approach; the knowledge, background, and skill of the teacher; and the methods of assessment. A review of syllabi simply ensures that, for each...

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