AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth | Hacker News Reader

AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

npr.org

39 pointsmarklabedz52 comments

Maybe the AP system has degraded over the years. When I was in school it helped immensely and I was able to enter college as a mid-year sophomore and graduate early. And the level of material and rigor in AP courses seemed roughly comparable to 100 and 200 level college courses. The cynic in me sees this as a money making move, as it means that more incoming students will have to pay more to graduate.

I'm really curious whether Dartmouth performed any studies on the matter or if this is just a spontaneous decision based on anecdotal evidence.

P.S. Also, in my experience and observation taking 100 and 200 level classes in college is a pretty significant ripoff outside of perhaps the top 20 universities in the nation. Almost all of the time such courses tend to be taught by assistants and are heavily textbook based. For the vast majority of people pursuing a college education getting an AA at a community college and then transferring to a local state college is a far, far better option financially.

From the linked Associated Press article:

Rather than award credit for an introductory course to incoming students who got the highest score on the AP test, the department gave those students a condensed version of the Dartmouth course's final exam. Ninety percent failed, Tell said. And when those students went on to take the introductory class, they performed no better than those who did not have the high AP test scores.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1696110...

In defense of AP tests, they're meant to replace college level courses ... not university level courses. They're equivalent to what you'd encounter at a local community college, not what you'd encounter at the top 100 research universities in the country.

That's not what "college" means in the United States. "College" is a synonym with "University." There is sometimes some word usage where the connotations can be different, but rarely, and in particular, there's no difference in the notion of "university level courses" and "college level courses."

Generally the difference is that a college will offer undergraduate programs and universities offer both undergraduate and graduate degrees.

This is doubly confusing in the case of Dartmouth College, which is actually a university (I got my physics Ph.D. there - and they have a medical school, a prominent MBA school, etc.) but is called a "College" for interesting historical reasons involving Daniel Webster.

You know what I'd like to see - is a second study, in which students who got the highest scores on the Dartmouth course, with the same interval of delay also take that same final exam.

I was surprised at the number of fellow students at my University who openly admitted that within a month or two of the final exam, they couldn't recall much of anything about some of the courses in which they had scored an A or higher in.

It's entirely possible that the issue isn't the AP courses, but the significant delay taking (and doing well in the course) - and retesting again.

Alternatively - take a student from another Ivy League, Yale, Harvard - and see how they would do on a Dartmouth Final exam with some delay between taking the course and testing out again.

Indeed. A lot of education in the western world is remarkably shallow. Blitz through a lot of "material" and busy work, then cram so you can pass the test the next day, then forget everything. It's a horrible way to "learn" anything.

I found the issue was just building on my education. You could teach me concept X until you were blue in the face, and I wouldn't remember a whole lot a few months later. But give me a half-decent education on concept X and then soon after move to something that builds on concept X, and I will retain a far greater understanding of concept X for far longer.

I think it is related to a similar effect I have noticed- when I teach something, I again retain that information much better.

Interesting. I wonder how much the trend of "teaching to the test" has infected the AP program.

Anecdotal evidence, I tested out of a bunch of courses with AP credits. The only ones I actually went directly to the next level were Economics. I scored 5's on micro and macro and skipped the 100 level of both. I did the intermediate and it went just fine (I got A's). Could I pass the final exam for the previous level with a 90% right when I got there? I am really not sure. Presumably I would have been studying and preparing for that weeks in advance and the content would be fresh in my mind (not after a summer of not studying). I don't feel like I missed anything and saved a lot of time (and money).

Dartmouth has a very strong teaching tradition. Certainly not all the professors are good at it. But freshman etc. courses aren't taught by teaching assistants.

I was a physics graduate student at Dartmouth. The undergraduate lectures were given by professors, but most of the homework and exam grading, and all the lab instruction, was by us, and doing this was a requirement for the Ph.D. I discovered in teaching my first lab that 1/3 of the undergraduates at this Ivy League school, mostly premeds in this case, did not know how to add fractions.

The main difference between AP tests and college courses is not the material that is covered (roughly comparable), but rather the format in which the knowledge of the material is evaluated.

Like most standardized tests, the AP tests are incredibly game-able. As a student, I began taking random AP tests without taking the class and just studying a guide the week before the test. I passed every test (most with a 5), but that was because I had learned to become good at the test, rather than learning the material behind it. (There are some exceptions, like art portfolios)

But myself and the above commenter (InclinedPlane) are the exception. There is, frankly, no better way for a student to demonstrate prior knowledge of a subject than through a standardized test.

Dartmouth, and all colleges, are welcome to set their policies to reflect their trust in the system, but there should be a way, whether internal or standardized, for a student to be placed based on prior knowledge.

"just studying ... the week before the test. I passed every test"

I'm not sure this supports your conclusion. My guess is that many of us could do the same for the final exams of the classes those AP tests translate to credit for. In fact I'd guess most of us either did this or know of many people who did the same for even more advanced classes.

Some of the more cynical responses to this article ignore the fact that AP credits at Dartmouth were already strictly limited by departments on a case-by-case basis. I went in with 11 AP credits and was able to graduate at most a term early.

Here are some more concrete numbers on how this change affects early graduation:

- Students arrive with an average of three credits;

- Nonetheless 80% of students take 4 years;

- 20% of students will be required to enroll for an extra term.

The net result is $4 million in extra income. [1] As a point of reference, Dartmouth's endowment is over $3.4 billion.

I also want to point out that this discussion ignores reasons against AP at the high school level, which has caused some high schools to stop offering them.

[1] http://www.dartblog.com/data/2013/01/010556.php

College math instructor here; I've taught Calculus III for the past three years. I always feel bad for my freshman students, particularly those in the fall semester. Some of them are prepared, and some aren't, but almost none of them have a mature understanding of mathematics that we expect in a sophomore-level course.

The problem with AP from my observation (at least in math) is that it encourages teaching the test. I'm certain many of them have never seen \lim_{h->0}\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h} before, so how can they suddenly expect to understand the limit definition of a partial derivative either?

I took a Calculus course in high school, skipped on taking the AP test, and then took an honors section of Cal I when I got to college to get a deeper understanding (and an easy first-semester A). I feel I made the best decision.

Possibly worth throwing into the discussion: Caltech does not accept any AP credit. However, classes can be tested out of with Caltech's own tests (which were considerably more difficult than AP tests in my opinion). Testing out of these classes removes these classes from graduation requirements.

Is it possible Dartmouth is just trying to raise their academic standards rather than milk students for more money?

If AP classes don't give credit, I wonder if this will lead some students to graduate high school after three years.

And get a jump start working on their Bachelor's degrees which now take six years.

Seems like the high schools need to add some more rigorous classes for seniors.

Why take any classes that aren't required? I get the impression that "education" is now a luxury and most kids today need to get to a degree as fast as possible so they're merely saddled with debt instead of totally crippled. In that mindset, the only purpose of high school is to either get into college or get into some vocational training as soon as possible.

Maybe only rich people are applying to Dartmouth, though.

A high school degree ought to be good for something. Students are entitled to four years of effective free education. If high schools can't engage them I think the government should be on the hook for the bill for the first year of college.

I would prefer they figure out why High School has become so devalued and fix that. We should respect both the student's time we are requiring and the taxpayers who are paying for a defective product. Buying students a year of college doesn't fix the problem and acknowledges that we wasted their time.

Seems like a high school diploma should guarantee a basic level of competency with literacy, math, and scientific knowledge. 2/3 of first year college students in the US have basic or below basic levels of proficiency with the English language.

My girlfriend teaches high school. Another teacher there teaches a class sponsored by a local community college.

The curriculum is strict, and the teacher needs a masters to qualify. And then the kids end up with real college credit.

I think that the quoted statistic is misleading. For the students that are at top-tier universities like Dartmouth, the vast majority of students are still graduating in 4 years:

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

I think that the 6 year figure is due to an extraordinarily long tail.

I took classes at the local community college at night of my Junior year in HS, and during the afternoon of my Senior year since my HS didn't have AP courses (heck, they didn't teach trigonometry or above in Math). It seems like a pretty good strategy then and it will probably be going forward. Community College tend to have better 100 level courses since you get a person hired as an instructor.

Graduating early just mean problems in the dorms and paying for expensive 100 level courses.

Accompanying headline: My Kid With AP Credits Will No Longer Be Applying to Dartmouth

Or, what's more likely for most people: Kids with AP Credits Will Now Have Slightly More Debt After Graduating From Dartmouth.

Wait, why will they have more debt than non-AP credited kids?

Not "more debt that non-AP credited kids", "more debt than they otherwise would have if Dartmouth took their AP credits".

Yes, pardon my slight ambiguity there.

No, they would have more debt because the credits AP credit provides are cheaper than the "premium" credits you'll now have to get through Dartmouth instead.

Twist ending: Dartmouth reconsiders decision to drop AP credits

AP credits have never been a particularly great ROI. My wife went the different route of signing up for classes at the local community college. You get a lot more out of them (in the rush to keep up with the joneses, high school administrators are calling everything "AP" these days), and also colleges are quite willing to accept those credits for lower-level classes.

My high school offered a joint enrollment with a nearby public university. Taking my senior year there was by far the best decision I made in high school, and way more illuminating and engaging than if I had signed up for all AP courses.

As a current student at an Ivy League school, it's interesting to see that this is getting much backlash now. My school hasn't accepted AP credit for a while now, and it's never been a problem. Students grouse superficially, but for the most part, it's understood that they're just prerequisities to get in to the schools you want to go to.

So my daughter is in High School and she's doing IB (International Baccalaureate) does that have any benefit for those aspiring to the Ivy League or similar?

It does, AFAIK IB is respected more than AP on campus. Of course, the more rigorous subject matter will be better for her in the long run anyways.

The relevant pages on the Dartmouth College website

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/credit_...

http://www.dartmouth.edu/admissions/apply/thinking/credit.ht...

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/advance...

don't appear to be updated to match what is reported in the AP article.

What's really news here is that Dartmouth ever granted credit for AP courses--that is unusual in the Ivy League, of which Dartmouth is one of eight members. On the other hand, there are hundreds upon hundreds of other colleges all around the country that continue to offer AP credit for AP scores on specified tests of a specified level, so each high school student who decides whether or not to take an AP test is deciding to do so based on what colleges the student is considering attending. This is no big deal. Each college decides its own policy. The policy of Harvard

http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&pag...

http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/transfer/tra...

will continue to be different from the policy of (for example) Rutgers,

http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/academic-credit

http://sebs.rutgers.edu/new/aptests.asp

http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/ad...

and students will continue to compare the varied college policies on AP credit

http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_get.htm...

http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.j...

among a lot of other trade-offs the students consider when deciding where to attend college, including whether or not they are admitted to the college in the first place.

This was my first reaction as well, Princeton also does not offer credit for AP classes:

http://www.princeton.edu/pub/ap/

On the contrary, it is actually very common for Ivy League schools to offer AP credit, or at the least allow you to use AP credit to fulfill a requirement / prerequisite. Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania all offer AP credit or allow fulfilling prerequisites. Outside of the Ivy League, Stanford offers AP credit. MIT offers AP credit for 2 classes and elective credit for humanities AP classes.

None of these schools, however, will offer AP credit for all AP classes, since there is a lot of variability in the rigor of each AP class. Three of the AP classes that I've observed tend to be accepted for credit are BC Calculus, Physics C, and Economics. Physics C (for Mechanics and Electricity) was the most challenging AP test I ever took.

I know that the AP system is under-fire, but this just screams money grab technique to me...

I don't get it. You can't make things harder than they are by their nature; sure, you can make interestingly problems, but in a discipline is a discipline. For example, general calculus hasn't changed that much in decades. The same stuff I learned in AP calc senior year of highschool, people learned freshman year of college. The only thing was, in highschool the exam questions were actual problems and not proofs of Stokes theorem or some other wildly pure math question.

I found my intro-level college calculus course to be fairly dissimilar from what we did in AP CS in high school, though I assume both can vary considerably. The main difference was that the high school course was much more calculation-oriented: a huge portion of it was just computing integrals and derivatives. I didn't find memorizing patterns for computing integrals or derivatives particularly interesting or useful: if all I need to do is compute one, Mathematica can do that much for me. What I learned in university calc, but not high-school calc, was more of the rigorous foundations of what calculus is and how it works. Part of it might be context, though: the freshman calc class was synchronized with the freshman physics and chemistry courses, so there were immediate applications where we had to figure out how to use calculus as a tool, rather than just as a standalone exercise (my high-school physics and chem courses were not calculus-based, so there was no similar synergy).

It always felt like you were robbing yourself of really interesting college courses if you skipped them due to AP.

I always saw AP as more of a gateway to college due to the prestige/GPA-boost they gave your application, rather than a real way of getting significant college credit.

More important than the GPA, prestige or credits is the ability to get ahead of the curve because of prerequisites.

In math many classes are closed to you without a year of multivariable and pretty much everything interesting is closed until you've taken first year calc. The same is going to be true to varying degrees for biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, psychology, econ, etc.

Actually, it's the reverse. If you score well on AP and then elect to take the class, you'll probably get a high grade. However, if you take the class and realize you're in over your head, you damaged your GPA. AP credits didn't count at my school for your final GPA, so fewer classes meant each class counted more.

I skipped almost 30 hours of credit with AP. It still took me 5 years to graduate after switching my major 2nd year. If I had to re-take those classes I skipped, I would be 1) bored, and 2) loaded with busy work instead of being able to take classes I wanted. I have friends that had to take Calc 1, whereas I went right to calc 2. Can't say I would have wanted to take it again.

The AP gradations are useless. If I remember right the calculus exam has about 120 possible points and you only need about a 56 to score a 5.

I took an exam where the median score is typically zero

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemati...

Also the subject of the funniest HN thread ever:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

That doesn't tell you anything (it could be hard to get 56), and your numbers appear to be wrong[1]. Site below says ~70/108 is the general threshold for a 5 on both calc exams.

[1] http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ap-tests-preparation/499...

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