College Board drops AP comp sci & latin for racial diversity reasons
edweek.org
edweek.org
Edit: "In the 2007 administration, 5,064 students took the exam." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science#Grade_distr...
If that isn't an ironic statement I don't know what is. The best way to reach a broader range is to reach less? Maybe the AP needs a course offering in logic.
I'm a CS PhD student. I think it's terrible that they have to cut some CS AP classes. But I also understand that they have a limited budget, and a mandate to help as many students as possible with that budget. It's easy to criticize them for cutting classes we think are valuable, but we aren't faced with the problem of trying to use a finite budget to cover classes in the sciences, math, history, literature, languages and the arts.
Instead, one of the new classes offered that fall was a dance class.
Maybe it's best if students see less badly taught computer science while in high school?
This is a really terrible loss. I don't get it at all.
It's a shame that they're discontinuing AB; it was actually pretty good when I took it.
I had some great memories in that class and definitely gave me the background I needed. Probably learned more in that class than in the early college Comp Sci classes.
Definitely a shame to lose it.
In actuality, my enjoyment of that class solidified my decision at the time to major in CS when I went to college.
Sad to see it go, I think it is a big mistake to cut it.
My youngest sister is taking the AP CS exam next month, and I was helping her study a few weeks ago. The first question she asked me (she's taken a semester and a half of AP CS at this point) was: what's the difference between an Array and an ArrayList?
To explain this, I had to go into: primitives, objects, and references; auto-boxing and un-boxing; generics; memory allocation and garbage collection; the different APIs (one uses length, another uses size)...
About 80% of her textbook was stuff like this. Details of the Java language that have very little to do with learning Computer Science. Only about 20% of her textbook as devoted to "algorithms".
For many people this is essential. My young cousin changed his mind about pursuing CS in college because his HS course work focused too much on tedious details. He was not able to perceive what high-level programs are capable of doing and the power programming as a medium of creative expression. Its a big shame.
I'd much rather the course be taught in a language more amenable to teaching computer science (Python, perhaps?). But if it must be Java, better some CS education than none at all.
I had two courses of introduction which were pre-reqs to take that my senior year. These courses were in BASIC. While not the best, they got the job done.
It is merely a standardized test, with an accompanying standardized curriculum. How schools decide to teach that curriculum is up to them.
For example, I had to take two semesters of Java before I could take the AP/IB CS class; however, my high school currently allows students to enter AP CS (material unique to International Baccalaureate pushed back to an independent study) straight from Honors Algebra II.
AP Chinese or Japanese Literature courses are still being debated, but we were teaching Italian Lit?
I think we should start giving our brightest young men a larger dose of mathematics and Asia. They will work the rest out on their own if we give them good fundamentals.
Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US. This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school. AP should expect more, at least differential equations, and I myself would be more comfortable if AP required Advanced Calculus, (Real Analysis).
Some people think I expect too much. To them I would say look at the numbers. China has more HONOR students than the US has STUDENTS, even when we include the drop outs. Keep in mind that includes only their TOP students, their 'B' students are excluded from that count, and a 'B' student in China would be an honor student here. The luxury of educational tracking as we have known it is one that is too expensive for us going forward. Time to raise the bar. It is going to be increasingly difficult to address this issue through immigration. Education is the only way out. All hands on deck. We should start to do what it takes to get this done.
I am a firm believer that the only sure way forward, is through education.
In addition, students from some countries are bound by their gov't to return since the gov't paid for their full ride, they have to go back and work for a couple of years. So sometimes, they don't end up staying here in the US.
Most colleges offer H.S. Algebra II-level courses to incoming freshmen -- nevermind requiring high school students to take calculus to graduate.
> This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school.
My guess is that all we would be accomplishing is reducing the high school graduation rate. The only way it would be worthwhile to require calculus to graduate from high school is if we created a two-track high school system and started sending non-college-track kids to vocational school.
In any case, I would say that if we were going to revise the high school math curriculum, we should add a year of probability and statistics, not more calculus, especially (god forbid) differential equations. Possibly by shifting "Algebra I" into junior high school coursework, or by making Geometry an elective. I strongly suspect that the fundamentals of probability would be a lot more useful to most people than Euclidean geometry.
Having high school kids take DiffEqs would do more to make kids hate math than anything I can imagine.
I bet this country would be a lot better off teaching Econ 101 to every student graduating than teaching differential equations, or even Calculus. Who needs to know Calc? Math, Science, and Engineering majors. Some business and finance majors, but not all. That is not the majority of people in college must less the country. Yet everyone should understand the country's economy a bit better. I have always found a lot of smart people do not understand the actual demographics of the country because they only see the people around them, who are in fact also smart people. Realize that the country is largely made up of people who have never gotten closer to high math than what they see on the blackboards in movies like Good Will Hunting, and could care less.
Also consider most education majors never are required to get past Calc 1, who would teach it?
I'm all for offering it, I took Calc in high school and I know other engineers who took ODEs in high school, but requiring any more than Calc 1 in high school makes no sense to me.
/sarcasm
And yet somehow I doubt the College Board is going to drop the SAT anytime soon. Dropping AP classes "for racial diversity reasons" is like making Rosa Parks the TV spokeswoman in the front to mask the secret eugenics program going on in the back.
[1] It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform [2] C.f. the academic research into the validity of the SAT on the College Board website. (There have been plenty of popular press articles written on this too.)
Actually, it's more likely that political correctness creates a chasm between what people say and what they really think.
http://www.livescience.com/health/070522_finger_sats.html
Although I myself did well on the SAT's, I too am hesitant to support the use of correlations like these in determining what students, or anyone deserves.
With regard to SATs and academic performance, the first google result:
"Findings indicated a very low correlation between SAT math scores and overall college math grades of six graduating classes at one university"
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...
You may enjoy this anecdote, in which someone even more self-righteous about such things makes a fool of herself:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/05/finger-length-and-sat-sco...
If you really wanted to figure out the value of the SAT you would have to use a much more robust measure of cognitive development than freshman GPA. However, it doesn't look like anyone is going to undertake such a massive project anytime soon. Incidentally, Alfie Kohn has some really good stuff to say about grades in both Punished By Rewards and also in What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?
Also, I should have mentioned above that there are some meta-studies that find that degree of validity depends on the person's race, and that if you take the person's race into account the test can be useful. I have multiple objections to this though, both practical and theoretical.
They mention that a 100 point increase on the SAT corresponds to a 0.1 boost on college GPA. Assume a linear relation: this means that a 1500 SAT student might expect a 3.0 GPA, while a 1000 SAT student might expect a 2.5 GPA. That's actually a great predictor.
Then they mention other studies of SAT scores within a fixed college. This is deceptive. A typical college has students from a narrow SAT range (say 1200-1400). By the above numbers, one expects that SAT predicts only 0.1 GPA above/below the mean (within the college). However, it also predicts that if the school were to ignore SAT and admit a cohort with SAT's of 800, then those students would underperform by half a letter grade.
There is one study that shows there is a correlation between SAT score and college GPA, but only for students whose HS GPA is above a 4.0. In general though the test doesn't really have any validity.
Here is a link to the studies the College Board is promoting:
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/...
One of the most noticeable differences between A and AB is that in AB, you go into algorithms and big O notation in much more depth, and you do some work with implementations of binary trees and such. When they cut out AB, they are leaving what is essentially an AP Introduction to Java.
It's sad that this passes off as computer science. I'm taking the test so I can hopefully skip the course and move on to fun stuff that has APCS as a prerequisite. Fun stuff like AI. AI, the class where Python and Ruby are the default languages, and you get to use other things if you want, like Lisp.
(I found this out when I still didn't know much about Lisp, saw someone using it, and laughed at the stupid, old language with all the parentheses. The guy tried to explain that Lisp is a good language, but I wasn't convinced. Later I independently stumbled on some of PG's essays, and I was convinced.)
Thanks for the citation, but since I can't look up the book right now, perhaps you can answer a question. Is that really measuring the "average?" Or the average score of 13-year-old white students who are taking the test? That's a very biased sample; for instance, I took the test when I was 12 only because I seemed likely to qualify for the Center for Talented Youth.
Unfortunately I don't have my copy on me so I can't look up the footnote in the back. IIRC it was the SAT, but I'm not entirely positive.
If you want to see something really telling about standardized testing though, check out this Greg Palast article on how the NCLB discriminates against minorities:
http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/nation/13968-no-child-left-...
Insulting question: I wonder if the authors made a certain specific error, when making said error implies the person is either ignorant, stupid, or intellectually dishonest.
I'm not not going to defend the statistic since I haven't seen the methodology. That said, I do think it's insulting to the authors to ask if they've made a very basic and specific error without first reading the methodology.
In any event, I'm sure you could email any of the authors and ask where the statistic came from if you are interested.
Did you know that weight doesn't correlate very well with linebacker performance in the NFL? It could be that a 350-pounder is just as effective as a 150-pounder, and there's some pro-fat discrimination -- or it could be that you're talking about correlation within a school, which chooses people on the basis of multiple criteria including SATs, such that their students are about equal academically.
Consider: a school could look at two people, one of whom gets a perfect math SAT and a 500 verbal, and another of whom gets 600 on each and writes a killer admissions essay. The former student gets a 3.5 focusing on math and CS. The latter gets a 3.5 taking English and Philosophy. This is the kind of evidence schools find; that people play to their strengths, so as long as they're of similar average talent, they'll have similar success, even if an individual measure of that talent doesn't correlate with their relative success among people who by the average of many measures, are very similar.
This has been a well-known problem with the studies you cite for over a decade.
Note that the book is written about, and the comment refers to, <em>schools in large cities</em>.
In general, education seems to me to have very little to do with schooling, and a lot to do with culture. Most of my "really smart" friends learned on their own or from their parents. The ones who focus on learning things in class just can't keep up with the self-motivators.
Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.
The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic."
1) Four AP courses are being discontinued
2) High schools are are redesigning their curriculums and dropping classes in which minorities are either doing poorly or have no interest in taking. (I know that just because there is no longer an AP test for these subjects doesn't mean that schools are obligated to stop teaching the material, but many or perhaps even most of them will. Esp. since high schools are ranked by Newsweek solely based on the number of AP tests taken divided by the number of students.)
In the long run, I think story #2 is vastly more important than story #1.
At the same time, we definitely have many of the best minds in the world in America. If educating Americans was so important, I'd think we'd have figured it out by now. Is it really that impossible to make our school system better?
On the other hand, we do seem to be good at producing the consumers who power our economic engine. Isn't there just a big gapping inconsistency here?
I think this kind of debate won't be fruitful as long as we're afraid to say precisely what we mean, and have to talk about 'diversity' or 'minorities'. Look at the Harvard math department: http://www.math.harvard.edu/people/senior.html . You've got Gottleib and Hironaka and McMullen and Yau and basically all the proof you need that they are pulling successful people from many backgrounds. They have a higher fraction of actual minorities than the rest of the country!
It gets worse.
Gypsies are caucasian/european. Gypsies are known to be genetically and phenotypically non-caucasian. They also suffer from historic (and current) discrimination. No bonus points for you, whitey.
However, a Brazilian of 100% European ancestry (who speaks no Spanish) qualifies as Hispanic. This, in spite of the fact that his ancestors almost certainly oppressed the natives/slaves, just like an American of Portugese ancestry (who is white/caucasian). You get bonus points, Mr. Diversity.
Think it's nonsense? Are you a racist or something?
I know Gypsies are discriminated against, but I was under the impression that they're also, uh, very criminal on average, and generally not well suited to many modern careers (outside of entertainment, especially music, at which they excel). I'm thus unsurprised that there is not a powerful Gypsy Lobby agitating for affirmative action benefits, or maybe some sort of foundation started by a wealthy Gypsy industrialist. (The punk band Gogol Bordello seems to agitate for Gypsy rights, though. It's a start!)
I've heard that the Chinese and Japanese immigrants in Chile and Brazil are also treated as 'Hispanic' for these purposes, even though they obviously don't need a leg up in such matters. The same source mentioned that the 'Mestizo' ethnicity covers what people think of when they think 'Hispanic'. Is that accurate? (This problem also shows up in racial crime stats; the FBI rather promiscuously mixes whites and Mestizos, so it's very hard to tell that, for example, white-on-black rapes are incredibly rare, at fewer than ten per year -- because Mestizo-on-black rapes are more common).
This might have some sort of application to affirmative action schemes, or the efforts to sculpt a course so it somehow doesn't discriminate among the groups that are better or worse at it. But I'm not sure what that application might be.