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This article is strange. Unless something has changed recently, AP exams do not have a concept of pass or fail. You get a score and colleges can choose to give you college credit based on the score.

I got a 1 on the AP Calculus exam but colleges wanted a 3 or a 4 or a 5 depending on their requirements to give me credit for college calc. So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'.

I have no doubt he's probably an exceptional teacher. That AP Calculus test was really really hard when I took it a decade ago, but the metrics don't make any sense to me

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> I got a 1 on the AP Calculus exam but colleges wanted a 3 or a 4 or a 5 depending on their requirements to give me credit for college calc.

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)

Yes. It is. I went down hard...

Most colleges give credits for 3 and above on AP exams so many people think of a 3 as "passing".

Source? All the schools I looked at required a 4 or 5.

It depends on your school. 3 is considered passing grade by the collegeboard, but some schools only accept 4+. For example UCI [0] allows 3 for credit, but USC [1] only accepts 4 or above, which I guess is progress since in high school one of the factors (besides the price) was that USC wouldn't accept any AP credits at all.

[0] https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/creditandplacement/credit...

[1] https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/creditandplacement/credit...

Just a nitpick: as others have mentioned, the College Board has no concept of a "passing" grade. Just numeric 1-5. It is colleges and teachers that consider a 3 or better "passing".

Here's a site that calls 3+ passing - http://blog.prepscholar.com/average-ap-scores-for-every-ap-e...

Anecdotally when I took them 14 years ago 3+ was considered passing, and most mid-level schools took 3+ for credit except for things they specialized in, with higher tier schools requiring 4+ in more subjects.

The AP Board has a school lookup and the few schools I looked at (a mix of big state schools and more elite private universities) seemed to bear this pattern out.

Because I just went through this: UNM (which is to be fair a large state school and has practicaly no entrance requirements) gives 3 hours for a 3 on CalcAB and 4hrs (which is the equivalent of their calc 1+lab) for a 4 or 5. but otherwise my microecon, usgov, phys1 and english comp all got credit on 3s.

NMT an hour south also gave me credits for those back a decade ago my first tie through college (though the classes themselves I think transfered as generic math or social studies credits not specific classes)

State law in Texas now, all (Texas) public universities must accept a 3 for some sort of credit.

Yes, I teach Math at a college, and am a former dept chair. We require 4 or 5, as do the folks I talk to at other schools.

I had a conversation with a prof from Harvey Mudd and another prof from somewhere else who was an AP calc grader. The HMC prof said they quit giving credit for 5's because not all recipients of 5's could do the work. The grader commented that he could understand how, as the range of 5's is quite broad. My take-away was that there is insufficient granularity at the high end.

To be fair, a 5 on something like Calc BC means you got more than like 60% credit. It's not surprising that someone on the low end of that would struggle.

Also, in the last several years it's become more and more common for AP classes to simply "teach to the test". They pump our students who can get 5s on the test but have little practical knowledge of the subject.

I also wonder if there is also a difference in focus between your university and the AP exam. For instance my highschool allowed use of TI-89 and focused heavily on concepts and word problems. This was similar to the AP exam, so I was top of my class in Calculus and scored a 5 on the AP exam. However in college I struggled in post BC calculus like diff-EQ because they put a strong emphasis on differentiating and integrating by hand and banned all but the simplest calculator.

I was shocked I got 5 in physics, doing well in multiple choice made up for skipping two of the five word problems. It seems weird to have the best possible score not require answering all the questions correctly.

I had that same conversation with a prof from Occidental College.

In this case it was more like griping that people who had placed out of freshman Calc because of AP did not, in many cases, understand Calculus. They knew enough to pass the Calc AP exam, but they had a very shallow understanding, so they couldn't use their knowledge in applications.

He said they really hated the push to get so many students to place out via AP, because it was only hurting them later.

> hurting them later

We have some students with tight programs (for instance, future elementary educators) where the extra course is a big help, so there is that on the other hand.

All depends on the school.

My 5 in US History yielded 6 credits, 3 in Calc zero credits and 3 in English 3 credits.

And even that breaks down by colleges in universities. This was not the case for me. Virginia Tech has 2 calculus courses. One for Math/CS/Eng majors and the one for everyone else. I was in the former and they did not accept my 3.

eyyy VT represent. Ill be attending this fall for Engineering ultimately aiming for Computer Engineering. How was/is it?

Apparently the result from the class on quantum physics is both a pass and a fail.

Depends how you look at it. ;)

A few years ago, someone at Oxford University's admissions office said that U.S. students have almost no chance of getting in if they don't have 4 or 5 on various AP exams.

In general British university admissions are conditional on good exam results, as the British education system has no notion of "grades" other than scores on exams.

A 3 is widely regarded as passing on AP exams.

source: I took AP exams last year.

So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'.

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.

Running a little off-topic, there is evidence that a Cambridge maths exam series 150 years ago had a pass mark of about one and a half percent, and the top scorer achieved about 45 percent.

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

According to Ulam's memoirs, Hardy thought very poorly of the Tripos as a test of anything in particular.

I have had many tests where the material tested is not a strict subset of the material taught, and some problems require creative generalization or insight during the test.

Life 101?

I had this too in Mechanical Engineering, especially on exams where you have e.g. an hour and a half to solve 5 problems and more so as you take higher level classes. There would often be room for interpretation in the questions, and part of the problem was to make sure you're making the right assumptions about the system.

I remember one test in particular in a class about heat transfer where one question was essentially "Same problem as the previous question, but now assume <something less simplistic>". My answer was something along the lines of, "Whoops, I already made that assumption in the previous question. Extra points?" The professor was kind enough to grant me a few bonus points.

Most real life situations don't require you to solve 3 distinct problems in an hour.

That's why most degrees require you to produce a thesis, which is closer to what you'll need to do later.

Not trying to brag, but I also took it a decade ago, (2005 to be exact) and i found it startlingly easy, and got a 5 no problem. So did many of my classmates. It made calculus 2 in college a breeze, since even though the exam had integral stuff on it, colleges would only give me credit for Calc 1.

A 3 or higher is considered a pass

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