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About 100,000 teachers of Advanced Placement courses, most of them in U.S. high schools, have an extra assignment on their desks this spring. But it's for them, not their students. If they want their courses designated as "AP" in the 2007-2008 academic year, so they can be identified that way on student transcripts, they must comply with a new audit the College Board is conducting to reinforce the program's quality and credibility.
Courses that pass will be listed in a ledger the College Board will send to all colleges and universities in the country in November, and each fall thereafter, and will also be posted on the Internet for the public to see. Courses that do not pass will not be allowed to carry the AP label for the coming year, though teachers can try to win approval the following year.
Quality Concerns
The AP program, which the College Board has managed for 52 years, includes 37 courses in 22 subject areas. About 62 percent of U.S. high schools provided at least one AP course last year, up from 57 percent in 2000. According to the Board, more than 90 percent of the nation's colleges and universities grant credit, advanced placement or both to incoming students who earn qualifying grades on the AP exams.
But the College Board acknowledges that as more high schools offer more AP courses, some are applying the AP designation without following official course descriptions or offering AP exams that are key to the program. Similarly, some schools are designating courses as AP without Board authorization.
The audit comes, therefore, at the urging of high school faculties and college admissions officers, says Sue Landers, director of AP program development. "They want us to preserve the AP label for courses that are true AP and make sure that teachers and principals understand the expectations that colleges have for those courses." Similarly, Helene Zimmer-Loew, executive director of the American Association of Teachers of German and a former member of the College Board's world language academic advisory committee, says, "We were concerned about the quality of the program and whether kids actually took AP, or just had it on their records but didn't really take it."
"If the College Board were not to implement a course audit to prevent such misuses, it is possible that the AP designation on a student's transcript could become less meaningful to colleges and universities," the Board tells teachers in its audit instructions. And there are indications that may already be happening. Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, says some of those officers raise caution flags when they see AP on academic records of applicants who want to attend their institutions. "There has been a marked increase in the number of high school courses designated as AP, and from conversations with our members, we are increasingly finding concerns about what that designation really means," Nassirian says. Counselors who advise high school students on college preparation are also telling them that "they really are not guaranteed anything out of AP classes any more, and have to read the fine print in terms of what colleges are or are not going to offer in credit for these courses," says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association of College Admission Counseling.
Audit Mechanics
The College Board contracted with the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), a not-for-profit organization at the University of Oregon, to manage the mechanics of the audit. EPIC is a partner of the Center for Educational Policy and Research, which works with federal agencies, state education departments, non-governmental organizations, private foundations and school districts on research projects. The audit kicked off in January when EPIC sent letters of instruction to teachers, administrators and AP coordinators in school districts throughout the country.
High schools develop their own curricula for AP courses, and as the Board explains in its instructions to teachers, the audit requirements "do not in any way constitute a mandated curriculum; they provide schools with tremendous flexibility in development of curricula." The Board also makes clear that the audit is not a teacher certification process, and there are no educational or professional background requirements to be an AP teacher. But while AP teachers generally seem to understand and support the audit's objectives, they are not pleased by what they have to do to pass. "I like the idea behind it, but it seems like a lot of extra work for us," says Ryan Rust, who teachers AP calculus at Plymouth (Ind.) High School.
