AP-palooza

The College Board is getting some serious press for their release yesterday of data on national and state-by-state AP test-taking and results for the class of 2006. The big news is that more of last year's grads--15%, up from 10% in 2000--took and passed AP exams. The percent of schools offering classes--62%--is also up. But there are still big inequities in AP course access and test-taking.

Jay Mathews, as usual, takes a novel tack, framing his report around the idea that some students in the D.C. suburbs' competitive hothouse high schools may actually be taking too many AP tests, because 3 to 5 courses are plenty to impress college admissions officers. I think this is kind of goofy logic. AP tests have a lot of value beyond getting kids into college. For starters, there's the whole preparation for college work thing. There's also the possibility of getting college credit. Back when my dad convinced me to take a ridiculous number of AP tests, his intent was not to get me into a competitive college, but to enable me to get out of college faster, thereby saving me and my parents money. (That didn't actually happen, but c'est la vie.) Of course, the really high-end schools don't let you get course credit for AP, so "hothouse" kids with their sights set there may not benefit from the extra tests, but a lot of schools do award course credit for AP, so we should be encouraging kids to take advantage of those opportunities to the extent it's possible for them to do so successfully and still maintain a healthy, happy teenage life (to the extent that any teenager is every happy of course).

The bigger issue, as Jay notes, is certainly not kids taking too many AP courses, but too few kids taking or having access to any at all. Jay knows this better than anybody--that's why his challenge index focuses on how many AP tests a school's students take.