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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

As someone not from the United States the acronym "AP" really threw me off. Had to look it up. It stands for Advanced Placement and despite its name is an introductory class.

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That doesn't quite convey the full meaning though. It's meant to be a college level introductory class that high school students who get ahead in other classes are allowed to take. Most AP courses also have the option to take a placement test at the end, and if you do well enough, you can receive college credit from the college or university backing the program.

In theory. In practice a college can freely decided if they want to accept them or not. My school loled at AP Computer Science classes and didn't accept them for any sort of credit for anyone.

It's accredited by a specific school, usually a nearby community college or university. If they reject AP credits they probably would have rejected any credits from that school. Some schools also require that your major credits be received from the school.

That's not necessarily a bad thing if those credits are in your chosen major. If you are a CS student, you'll want the university-quality CS education.

Indeed, I didn't think it was a bad thing.

However, College Board (the company who administers these exams) sells it as "university-quality CS education" and people pay money to take them. So they sell AP CS as a college level class but my school looked at it and said "this isn't college level."

In general, I'm very skeptical of the quality of these AP exams and if AP classes are truly are college level (I didn't take any myself, my school didn't offer AP classes and I was a huge slacker in high school anyway)

It's a college level course offered to high school students. Not sure where you're getting the idea that it's "introductory".

In American schools, the levels of a class on, say, European History would be:

European History -> Honors European History -> AP Euro History

You would just take one of them based on your ability and/or interest in the subject.

Students can complete AP courses and, depending on how they score on the exams, earn actual college credit at whatever school they end up at.

> It's a college level course offered to high school students.

I took the AP Physics C MITx course on edx (when I was in high school) and it was way below the level of our college Physics 1 course (electrical engineering, European university). Not saying it wasn't a great course (much better than anything my high school offered), but it just wasn't as mathematically rigorous.

Are introductory college classes in the US really so basic?

Yes.

I think the answer is "depends on the school."

AP classes (and most US first year college classes) are well below the standard of a typical senior year academic high school subject in France (and I suspect, though don't have direct experience, that this is true of most other European countries as well).

The key difference between the two systems is that far fewer people (rough guess is like 1/3 to 1/2 of kids) graduate from academic high school in those countries.

Take a look at the basic admissions requirements for Swiss universities (this happens to be the one I could find the most easily). Most of the Swiss universities listed in this table require either 5 AP tests or 2 years of college for students from the US to be considered. https://www.swissuniversities.ch/en/services/admission-to-un...

A basic US high school diploma is garbage not worth the paper it's printed on -- there isn't any sort of national standard, and the state school leaving exams just test basic literacy.

> there isn't any sort of national standard

One of the criticisms of US public education is that too large of a fraction of the curriculum is spent "teaching to the test", which doesn't allow room for teachers to show their individual talents and design curriculum which really reaches the students. I fear that additional national standards would only worsen that trend.

Just because something is a criticism doesn't mean it's a valid one. Basically every developed country has a national standardized school-leaving exam. Almost all of them have better education results than the United States.

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