Advanced Placement (AP) testing season is rapidly approaching and with it comes stress, a complete lack of sleep, and intense preparation for the various components of each test, which may include writing many responses for document-based questions (DBQs), literary analysis essays, free response questions (FRQs), or whichever aspect of the AP test you need to prepare for.
As someone who has taken many AP classes throughout high school (12 to be exact), I believe that the AP system is harmful, particularly when teachers devote large chunks of class time to preparing students solely for taking the AP test. Teaching to the test takes away any opportunity for students to dive deep into the learning and fully absorb the content. Kimberly Livesay, a former AP United States History and current non AP social studies teacher at Franklin, stated that “there were many areas [of AP US History] where I felt like we did not go deep enough, and it felt a little rushed for me.” The way the AP curriculum is set up forces teachers to go through content far too rapidly to ensure they are teaching their students the vast amounts of material that may or may not be on the AP test in May.
This is one of my biggest complaints about the whole AP system and testing in general—it teaches students how to learn quick, surface-level facts that they may be tested on; rather than allowing them to dive into, explore, and understand the content. According to Bri Stauper at Applied Educational Systems, a company that makes and sells curriculum, “teaching to the test can help students do better on their exams, but it often results in students learning based on memorization instead of practice or critical thinking.” This means students are more likely to memorize specific dates and facts rather than learning the content as a whole, and in fact, they are incentivized to do so by the way the curriculum is taught and tested. Beyond that, students are also likely to forget the material shortly after taking the test, which can then be problematic if the students decide to use their AP credits in college and can no longer remember the material they supposedly tested out of any number of years prior. Suddenly, students find that their AP tests did not provide the foundational learning and comprehension that they needed to draw upon to succeed in their upper level classes.
Another complaint I have with the AP system—and the fact that it forces students to learn solely for the purpose of taking a test—is that it inhibits the way teachers can teach. Some of the best AP classes I have taken in high school have been the ones where my teachers slow down and really spend time explaining the content and its significance to us. Unfortunately, this does not adhere to College Board’s fast, surface-level curriculum, leaving me to feel utterly unprepared for the test and forcing me to devote countless hours to studying to feel even remotely prepared for the test. However, these are the classes in which I’ve felt that I truly understand the material being taught and I will remember the content long after high school graduation. I consider these teachers to be some of the best teachers I have ever had, but they were just stuck trying to teach students a curriculum that was unfortunately designed to cover a lot of material in too short a period of time.
Opal Rockett, a Franklin student, said about the topic, “I think that the school system is unfortunately so heavily dependent on teaching to the test, not just for AP classes, and I can definitely see the negative effects it has on students, but it is a problem with the system, and I feel like it puts teachers in a difficult position.” When the whole system is set up to prepare students for testing, it does not allow teachers any flexibility to teach students how to analyze the content at a deeper level.
I have had teachers who spend almost the entire class preparing their students for the intricacies of the AP tests. While I appreciate how prepared these teachers made me feel for the AP test, I do not feel the content was taught to me in a way that would allow me to remember it long term. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the way these teachers were teaching the class, they were setting it up for success on the test.
A final concern I have with the AP curriculum, specifically surrounding history, is that the content feels whitewashed and easily bendable to any political agenda. For instance, after receiving backlash from Florida politicians over its new AP African American History class, which College Board had carefully researched, reviewed, and vetted, it changed some of the curriculum to please the politicians. College board does deny that they changed the curriculum due to outcry from the Fllorida politicians. In a New York times article, David Coleman, stated that the changes came from “input of professors,.” although many don’t believbe the college board’s reasoning for changing the curriculum, and believe they changed it to appease the Florida politicians. Changing curriculum due to a political agenda ensures that children will not be getting the most accurate story of the history being taught. When teaching AP US History, Livesay said she felt the curriculum was “very white-centered [with] the histories and stories of people of color very much on the periphery at all times.”
Overall, the AP curriculum as a whole does not seem to prepare students for college level classes or application of the content in the real world. Regrettably, when many students take AP classes they are doing so with the objective of earning college credit and boosting their GPA, not because they are actually passionate about the subjects they are learning —that is something AP makes it very hard to do. Rockett believes “the main motivation for taking AP classes should come from the passion to want to learn, and taking the test to see if you get college credit should not be the only reason to take the class.”
