You can argue about availability of AP classes / funding / etc, but that doesn't detract from the hard work of the AP students. Plenty of rich white kids take hard AP classes and get D's.
If we're saying that AP tests and classes are too easy, then of course people can have a discussion about increasing difficulty.
Stats from https://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Servi...
It comes back to the question of what universities should prioritize. Should they be optimizing for the fairest / most equal student body, or the most gifted / competitive student body?
What you want is the most talented, hardest working, brightest students. That's difficult to discern given the differences in the availability of opportunity. Scaling for availability is hard.
But it is clear that just selecting for the students who succeeded in the best environment will leave you missing out on potential. And worse, that rapidly becomes self-reinforcing, since the next generation of students will be influenced by your choices on this one.
That and babysitting so parents can work without their kids setting the house on fire.
Also, GPA is not a great measure of student quality. IRT [1,2] is better.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1434976 [2] https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
That's how the valedictorian and salutatorian a year or so after me ended up with final grades of something like 103.4 and 103.5.
Getting into an advanced class generally means you already know the material that would be in the normal class (taking trig the year everyone else is taking geometry, for instance). How did you get to where you already knew that material? Well, you were either in the advanced class the year before, or, you already learned the material outside of class. How did you already learn the material outside of class? Better education at home. Which is easy to do with a private tutor or stay at home parent; really hard to do with a single parent, or dual income that don't allow for much in education expenses.
And because you are in an advanced class, you basically get a .5-1.0 bump to your GPA (so people are graduating with a 4.5 GPA at some schools), all because you had the extra early resources; you can't compete with just what the school provides.
You are basically saying if someone is more educated, that they will do better in education.
Yes, that's the point. The more time and effort someone spends in their education, the better they will do in education.
That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money, rather than a reasonable consideration for class performance, knowledge, aptitude, or any such thing.
If all that's true, then yeah, it's just the kids' choice of how they spend their time and effort, and NOT a proxy for wealth. But I don't think all of that is true.
So if you engage in more and better education, above and beyond the education that one is engaging in school, then that person will be better at education?
Yes, of course.
Just like if someone practices basketball, outside of their school team, and hires a basketball tutor, then they would become better at basketball.
Obviously, if someone spends more of their own time on something, anything, whether it is education, or basketball, or whatever, then they would become better at that thing.
The only question now, is why would that possibly surprise you, that people who go above and beyond whatever everyone else is doing, would become better than everyone else at that thing?
Why would that surprise you?
> That means the grade inflation of AP classes just serves as an indirect proxy for money,
So you think poor people just don't work hard enough? Only rich people care about their future and are willing to put in the effort to better themselves?
Sounds like some conservative propaganda to me....