A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

A score of 1 on an AP exam is the lowest score possible on the exam, and represents an unqualified failure. (College Board describes it as "no recommendation": https://apscore.collegeboard.org/scores/about-ap-scores)

That reminds me of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grading_systems_by_country

It's interesting to see where the 'pass' bar is in different countries. I've always found the 50% mark, which seems quite popular, to be rather unusual since it implies that someone who 'passed' essentially was correct on only half the material tested (which is then a fraction of the material actually taught), and in any other setting a 50% failure rate would be completely unacceptable.

source: I took AP exams last year.

I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese is so simple compared to Latin or Japanese. And from what I recall, AP Chinese tested Mandarin at a 2nd grade level, and didn't test much or any of the chengyu (成語: Chinese proverbs) of which are difficult because of the shear number to remember.

Perhaps graders could tell they were native speakers, and thus raised the bar? (I took 3rd-year Chinese as a filler class "language requirement" in college and the professor expected high-school level of Chinese while she expected chicken scratch from others for the same grade.)

AP Computer Science seems likely to have a good number of perfect scores. I remember a test reviewer telling me that they often overlooked syntactical errors (unbalanced parentheses) and would allow API calls to incorrectly labeled API functions. (I don't disagree, because CS is more about understanding data structures than it is knowing how to put code on paper without an IDE or reference.)

It's not surprising if you realise that AP tests can't be gamed as easily as tests designed (and possibly graded) by those who taught the students taking the tests.

I think there's a trend of becoming a better student in college, so I don't find it so surprising to ace calculus in college.

myself as a counter example, I was an ace in high school passing 10/12 AP exams, and almost failed out of college--go figure?

How would design a uniform final exam for all, say, Calculus I courses? Sure, you can only test the intersection of all, but that encourages the teachers to only teach that subset. Instead, AP exams test the union of all, and normalize the score so that you only need, I think, a raw score of 60/100 to get a 5 on calculus. That way, teachers are encouraged to experiment with their curriculum, and students are not overwhelmed by the need to know everything there is to know. It's really a win-win solution.

A meter that is always pegged tells you nothing.

From the other end, the Catholic grade school across the street sent some of their 7th and 8th graders to take classes with us at the high school.

This was in the mid-90s.

http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/lincoln-h...

caveat; this is a magnet program of about 200 students within the overall two thousand and some

LAUSD just went through a massive building/remodeling of facilities last few years. Not all schools got it but ones that were remodeled look nice. But that is after decades worth of students who went through LAUSD sitting in ghetto classrooms. After about a decade the same classes will start looking dingy and few more decades will pass before another wave of remodeling.

Firefox has problems, mostly performance. But adblock and reader mode help greatly.

Yom says he keeps getting asked if there's some secret recipe for getting students to perform at their highest potential.

"This may sound corny, but you really have to love them," Yom says. "You build this trust, and at that point, whatever you ask them to do, they'll go the extra mile. The recipe is love."

Basically it comes down to soft skills. If people think you care about them they will care about what you want and think and help you achieve things together.

Perhaps you are biased from being surrounded by developers but It's akin to me (a non farmer) making a blanket statement like "Surely it isn't so hard to grow a tomato. Why are all these people in Africa starving?"

    Yom loved the movie "Stand and Deliver,"
    about legendary Garfield High calculus
    teacher Jaime Escalante's success with
    so-called unteachable students.

While I believe our primary and higher education systems could use a lot of work, I think the AP program is at least respectable as a stepping stone into higher education, especially for communities where higher education isn't a norm or accessible.

You are allowed to do that. Proctors won't clear calculator memory.

> I could have easily colluded with classmates, and if my teachers wanted to, they could've easily given me the answers.

Proctors and/or students will likely notice that.