In the last few weeks, I’ve spent considerable time updating my course websites for the 2020 summer session and academic year. This has been more complicated than usual, since I’ve decided, after considerable thought and inward turmoil, not to seek Advanced Placement recertification for the biology, chemistry, and physics courses I’ve taught for the last decade as formal “AP” courses.
A little background….
The College Board owns the “Advanced Placement” name and designation. Beginning in 2012, it required that anyone teaching a course designated for AP credit submit a syllabus for review by university faculty to ensure students were being prepared adequately for second year college work. Over the last eight years, the College Board has revised their syllabus requirements several times, remaining fairly flexible about how the course was offered and giving teachers latitude to emphasize areas or approaches as they saw fit. Curriculum suggestions and standards were minimal, and the AP examination remained largely a validation of adequate student preparation for advanced college work.
So what changed?
In 2018, the College Board announced that its program was radically changing in response to teacher and student feedback. The resulting syllabi revisions for biology, chemistry, and physics are quite specific in dictating course content and performance expectations. Teachers have fewer options to organize materials according to their own priorities. In particular, the syllabus for biology eliminates requirements for any instruction on human anatomy and plant physiology in order to focus on microbiology, evolution, and ecology, apparently assuming that students will cover physiology and anatomy in other courses. The chemistry syllabus increasingly focuses on professional level instrument use and the algebra-based physics syllabus has been broken into a two-year sequence that pushes modern physics topics to a seldom-taken second year. All three syllabi restructure the course schedules to eliminate any topics not covered on the examinations.
For biology in particular, I think this is a disastrous move for the students, however much lighter it makes the burden of instruction for the teacher. I believe that human anatomy and physiology should be taught in the context of cellular biology so that students understand how all levels of living systems work together. Many students, especially home-schooled students, attempt AP Biology without a previous course in high school biology. The new curriculum leaves them without a detailed appreciation of how their own bodies work at a time when this information is vital to help them make responsible choices for their own health.
There are implications for chemistry and physics as well. Most students won’t be going on to technical careers in chemistry; it is often a prerequisite for medical training at many levels. Performing basic chemistry investigations with limited equipment to experience fundamental principles of chemical reactions provides a better learning experience than when students perform cookbook experiments with equipment they don’t understand. Since most high school physics students are unable to take a second year due to time constraints, the current AP syllabus deprives them of exposure to the unity of field theory applications and the ramifications of modern physics: relativity, quantum mechanics, and nuclear energy.
When the exam is the focus, where’s the joy?
The College Board now requires that students register by early September for the AP test given the following May. This shifts the emphasis of the entire course from learning the subject to “teaching to the test”. Since Scholars Online courses are intended to provide our students with mastery of a subject, this runs counter to our teaching philosophy. I want my students to focus on exploring concepts and playing with ideas at the risk of making mistakes. It is difficult to experiment with possibilities when you are panicking about achieving a high score on an exam or to engage with the material joyfully instead of apprehensively.
The new AP program also heavily encourages the use of the College Board’s own website materials for unit testing throughout the year. While teachers no longer need to devise quizzes for their own students (a sometimes painstaking and onerous task), the feedback promised from the AP program will allow them to see how their students are doing (and collaterally, how they are doing as teachers) in preparing for the exam. The emphasis again is on exam performance, not on the subject matter.
There is another, more subtle issue with AP-provided online course support materials. It has been my practice to contain performance data for my students on the Scholars Online servers, rather than allow others to gather detailed information about my students’ ideas. I have not used publishers’ homework websites or quizzes that would identify individual students, and I refuse to change that practice when I do not know how personally-identifiable student data will be used in the future. The AP program has made no real assurances about the data they will be collecting this way.
I am very uncomfortable with the expanded level of content control by a major testing organization, many of whose directors are textbook publishers, and I’m not the only one. A number of prestigious private schools have dropped their AP courses to allow their teachers to teach creatively, rather than surrendering control of their courses to the College Board. Reluctantly, because it reduces an option for our students to gain formal AP course credit for their work, I have come to realize it is best to join them.
Participation in a formally certified AP course is not required for students to register and take the exam. I will continue to monitor AP course requirements so that the courses I am offering will prepare students to perform well on the AP exam if they choose to take it, and provide an equivalent lab experience. Students taking the non-AP versions of these courses have routinely achieved scores of 3 and 4 on the chemistry and physics AP exams, and 4 or 5 on the biology exams, so I do not believe this decision will put my students at a disadvantage, but that a unique approach to content and experiments will help them stand out instead.
If you have any questions or concerns about this decision, please let me know.