Rapid Growth of Advanced Placement Classes Raises Concerns

High school Advanced Placement classes, widely viewed as key to admission to top-tier colleges, are proliferating so rapidly that many educators say their quality is being diluted and school resources are being strained.

Designed to allow the most able students to get an early start on college work, the program now reaches more than 1 million students each year and is expanding at an annual rate of about 10%. Those who pass AP exams can often dazzle college admissions officers, skip introductory courses and even graduate from college early.

But the program’s tremendous growth--fueled by government subsidies and the owner’s aggressive promotion--is generating widespread concern among education experts, admissions officers, counselors, teachers and even some students. They fear that some AP classes don’t live up to the program’s own high standards or prepare students to enter college with advanced standing.

“It’s a very positive program, but it’ll only stay that way if there’s a response to all this pressure for improvement,” said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

AP’s many supporters and even some critics say that the program, owned by the nonprofit College Board, has improved academic standards and teacher training, and has brought a stimulating atmosphere to classrooms. It is still seen by many as the gold standard in high school education.

But recent developments suggest it is losing some of its luster:

* A recent report by the National Research Council criticized AP and other advanced math and science classes for covering too much material in not enough depth. The panel also raised concerns about teacher preparation, quality control and access to the classes, especially for minority students and those in rural and inner-city schools.

The report echoed a 2001 study commissioned by the College Board itself that acknowledged a growing shortage of qualified teachers and weak academic backgrounds of some AP students.

* Harvard University announced in February that it will award credit only to incoming students who receive the highest AP exam score--a 5 on a 1 to 5 scale. (Many schools give credit for 3s or above.) Stanford, Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, among others, also are rethinking their AP policies.

* An elite private high school in New York, the Fieldston School, recently dropped all AP classes, saying the prescribed curriculum was too focused on rote learning and detracted from the in-depth study that is the school’s specialty. Other top prep schools are also reassessing its value.

* Many high school counselors, teachers and students say the courses are outstripping resources--from classroom space to testing facilities to the availability of trained teachers. The shortage of qualified AP teachers could reach 100,000 within a decade, the College Board estimates.

College Board officials say they are trying to address these concerns by expanding AP teacher training, establishing clearer guidelines for AP classes and developing a program to better prepare middle school and high school students for such classes by boosting their English and math skills.

Overall, the AP program is still “as powerful an educational engine now as it has always been,” said Jenny Oren Krugman, a Florida-based College Board official. “We’re talking about a program that has given standards, a real assessment, and allows people to look at their performance. That said, must it be 100% of the answer to every educational question?”

While they are committed to addressing the identified problems, College Board officials say, they also are committed to extending the reach of the program.

“We think every school and every student should have access to this program,” said College Board President Gaston Caperton.

Established in 1955, the Advanced Placement program enables high school students to take its semester- or year-long college-level courses in 19 broad subject areas, ranging from art history to physics. Students may then opt to take the two- or three-hour exams. At some high schools, students need a teacher’s recommendation to get into an AP course; at others, any student may sign up.

The demand for AP courses stems largely from intensifying competition for college slots among children of baby boomers. Lastyear, 820,880 students took nearly 1.4 million AP exams, bringing in $98 million for the College Board. Nearly six in 10 high schools now offer AP classes.

Nowhere has the program’s growth been greater than in California, where the number of students taking AP classes nearly tripled from 1988 to 2000.

Much of that is because the University of California gives students multiple incentives to take part in AP. Not only are UC students who pass AP exams eligible for college credit, a transcript filled with such classes improves chances of admission, UC officials said.

Since 1984, students in AP or other honors courses also have received a boost in their grade point averages simply for taking the challenging classes.

“We wanted to really push students to take more rigorous work,” said Carla Ferri, the UC system’s undergraduate admissions director.

For UC applicants, the advantages are so great that in 1999 the ACLU sued the state on behalf of students at Inglewood High, alleging that its total of three AP courses was not sufficient. The school now offers 11 AP sections.

Partly in response to the suit, the state has begun covering most of the $78 cost of the exams for low-income students.

More and more, students see AP classes as a necessary ticket to college. One recent morning at North Hollywood High, which offers one of the most extensive AP programs in the Los Angeles Unified School District, a line of students stretched out the door of a college counselor’s office. They were waiting to sign up for next month’s AP exams.

“You can’t go to a good school unless you have them,” explained junior Diana Aguilar, who signed up for the English, U.S. History and Spanish language exams, adding to two others she took last year. “It makes you look smarter to colleges.”

At many urban high schools, the classes are the de facto college preparatory curriculum.

“The AP opens so many doors and it’s my responsibility to go through them,” said Crenshaw High School senior Caridad Pena, a Salvadoran immigrant who credits the program for her admission to UCLA.

But the very urban schools that are under the greatest pressure to add AP courses often are those that have the toughest times finding, training and retaining qualified teachers.

Crenshaw, a school with many low-performing students and significant discipline problems, is hard-pressed to hang on to its teachers generally, its administrators say, let alone more highly trained AP instructors.

“What I’m trying to do is develop a bullpen” of teachers to fill in for those who depart “without sacrificing quality,” said Marilyn Gavin, the school’s AP coordinator.

The quality of classes can vary dramatically by school. AP English classes, for example, typically require students to read extensively from works by noted authors and write essays.

At Fremont High in South-Central Los Angeles, however, members of the Academic Decathlon team recently complained that they were expected to do very little in their AP English classes.

“I [didn’t] even read one book the whole semester,” said Paola Valdivia, a Fremont junior. The final exam was to write a “friendly letter,” she said.

The discrepancies among schools show up in pass rates. At Crenshaw, 18% of exams received a passing score of 3 or better, compared with 60% of exams statewide.

Even at competitive schools such as North Hollywood, some students worry that they are pressed to take too many AP courses, covering too much material too fast.

Mia Lee, a 15-year-old senior who will graduate in June and has been accepted to Stanford, will have taken 13 AP courses by the time she leaves high school. Already, she said, she can remember relatively little of what she learned in the courses she took last year.

“You’re learning so fast and doing all this intense cramming,” she said. “You forget it all after the test and then wonder if you really learned anything.”

Facilities are stretched too. Counselors at several schools say so many kids sign up for tests that they must seat them cheek by jowl, against test protocol.

The courses also contribute to inequities within schools, some teachers and counselors say. With the best teachers assigned to AP, less able instructors often teach those who need the help more, said Kati Haycock, a Washington-based advocate for high academic standards. “In a high-poverty, high-minority school, it may be that that’s a bad use of resources,” she said.

The AP program slipped a bit from its pedestal last year after Fieldston, a selective school in the Bronx, withdrew from the program and later found its decision did not harm students’ ability to get into top colleges. The school--backed by a supportive letter from the Stanford University admissions office--opted to offer in-depth classes designed by Fieldston teachers rather than the survey courses typical of AP.

Other elite private schools say that they can design better courses as well.

Peter Gow, the academic dean of Beaver Country Day School in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline, says AP courses “probably have tremendous value for school systems that are perhaps floundering a little bit and are in search of high standards.” But for schools with established reputations such as his, it’s a “misallocation of resources.”

Some top colleges are reassessing the AP program as well.

With its announcement in February, Harvard apparently became the first university to require students to earn 5s on AP tests to receive college credit.

Harvard’s decision was based in part on a study of student performance in second-year chemistry and economics courses, which showed that students who had earned 4s on AP tests fared significantly worse in advanced courses in those subjects than those who had earned 5s. Overall, in fact, they did worse than classmates who had not taken AP classes in high school.

At Stanford, admissions dean Robin Mamlet said the university is considering reducing the amount of total credit--now equal to a full year of course work--that entering students may receive for AP test results.

Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania are engaged in similar, long-term reappraisals.

At Penn, the math department recently decided to award credit only for the highest score on the toughest AP calculus test after professors found that some students who had passed the test had little or no understanding of more basic math concepts, said Eric Schneider, associate academic affairs director.

A few elite colleges, including Caltech, have never awarded credit for AP classes. “We feel the course work we offer at Caltech is better than the course work the students typically take in AP courses,” said registrar Judith Goodstein.

At the nine-campus University of California, attempts to reexamine the role AP plays across the system have stalled, at least for now, as the university undertakes a series of separate, sweeping admissions changes.

In the meantime, a top UCLA administrator said professors complain increasingly that many students’ AP scores and credits don’t match their performance in class.

“We hear that students may have done reasonably well on an AP test, but often their level of proficiency is not what we expect of UCLA freshmen,” said Thomas Lifka, an assistant vice chancellor who oversees admissions.

In response, some UCLA departments have gotten stricter about awarding credit for middling AP scores or placing such students in advanced courses, but Lifka said more reform is needed.

UCLA student David Burke, 20, agrees. Burke, who earned senior standing after only three years because he loaded up on AP credits in high school, said he sometimes regrets doing so. The political science and English major said he passed AP math, for instance, but felt so unprepared for his advanced class at UCLA that he dropped it and enrolled in the introductory level.

Overall, he said, “I just wish I had spent more time learning in high school and not studying for the [AP] tests.”

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Times staff writer Massie Ritsch contributed to this report.