No-Win ‘Games’ at UC

Re “UC’s Grade-Point Games,” editorial, Nov. 14: Thank you for your editorial advocating the elimination of the system that privileges Advanced Placement courses in UC admissions. I’ve been pushing this needed reform among my colleagues for years, without much luck.

Your editorial properly emphasizes the ways in which the UC policy hurts disadvantaged students from schools that can’t afford to offer many AP courses, or schools that offer courses with the AP label that don’t really meet AP standards. But this policy hurts high school students at the opposite extreme too, by distorting their educational experience.

Each UC campus offers to its very best applicants a program called the Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholarships. High school seniors are invited to apply to this program based on the information in their admissions applications, and then go through a selection process that includes an interview with a member of the faculty. I’ve conducted many interviews over several years. I’ve met many young people with passionate interests that they are indeed pursuing at an advanced level -- but I’ve also met too many students whose lives are so filled with AP courses that they don’t seem to have time to be interested in much of anything. I find this a terrible waste of potential talent.

When I was a high school student, I took one AP course (in mathematics, the subject I loved best). I believe that that’s what the AP system is for: to encourage young people to pursue some area of interest in depth. Perhaps we could consider a compromise in which UC would give extra credit for the first AP course a student takes, but not for additional AP courses.

Brian Harvey

Berkeley

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Your editorial didn’t address a game students have been playing for some time with the AP courses and tests. As an AP U.S. history teacher for a dozen years, I was shocked to learn that some students didn’t care about passing the AP test. They earned an A in the course specifically to gain the grade-point differential because what mattered to them was getting into UCLA.

As for not passing the AP test, it didn’t bother them in the least to take the course again in college, because what counted was being admitted to UCLA or UC Berkeley, and the point differential gave them an advantage. Their cynicism was quite disillusioning.

Abraham Hoffman

Retired L.A. Unified

School District teacher

Canoga Park