| I did read it. The AP gets it rougher than the IBO. But maybe I'm not used to reading Academic-ese, because it didn't seem to me that they were taking a complete shit on the AP. In any event, I don't disagree that the AP and IBO need work, I just haven't seen a proposal for what we should be doing instead. (Maybe if those people learned to say what they mean directly, the non-academic advocates of school reform would have an easier time sorting things out.) A lot of the AP course problems seemed to stem from the 'teach to the test' mentality, which occurs because college admissions and school rating agencies use the test results in ways the Collge Board/AP did not intend, so schools and teachers are rewarded by gaming the system. In that respect, almost everything bad you can say about the AP or IBO courses can be said about regular classes thanks to NCLB. At least where my children attend high school, about 2/3 of all classes suffer from the same issues as AP classes, due to the need to put the kids through the state testing grinder. In that context, the difference between the two is that the AP classes, at least in math and science, while far from ideal, do expose the students to more advanced concepts than they would encounter otherwise. So, given the choice between AP classes, and non-AP classes that have the same fundamental problems except the course material is easier, what would you do? I expect your answer is neither, and you would propose something else? Do you have pointers to that info? I really am curious. |