Reply to Do AP 5's Matter for College Admission?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Congratulations on such an achievement!

In a perfect world, it should be determinative, just like the SAT (or ACT) since the College Board is a national organization and thus AP scores can be used to compare candidates coming from very different educational systems.  This is because GPA is hard to trust - so many public schools have grade inflation, and each school weighs advanced courses differently, forcing colleges to recalculate GPA anyway.

And yet everything I've read seems to discount the importance of AP scores. I do not understand it. It's not really fair. Even if you hold that paying for APs is a factor of wealth and thus inequitable, that reasoning doesn't make any sense. By far the greatest injection of inequity is the extra-curricular category, that weighs so much in US college admissions. The cost of APs, by comparison, is negligible.

So...?
[/quote]

I agree. There is a high school near us that has an "AP for All" curriculum (meaning everyone takes AP classes - the non-AP versions don't exist). The school is known among parents for not being rigorous at all, almost no homework, and kids who take the AP tests, generally get 1's or 2's. But the college placements are amazing (Duke, Michigan, Cornell), because all the  transcripts show 4.0s in 15+ AP classes. There really should be some check on this, but there isn't.[/quote]

Apparently, you are the check. Are you a teacher or admin who has access to all the data? How do you know all those transcripts show 4.0 but most AP exams are 1s and 2s??

I don't understand this whole focus. A student's AP exam scores for all of their senior year AP classes aren't even available until after they graduate high school. There's no way of knowing what those scores are going to be before students have to decide which college acceptance they're going to take. Why is this even a question?[/quote]

It's a small school in NY. I know a dozen parents there and they all say the same thing. The kids aren't well prepared and they don't love the lack of rigor, but they know that putting their kids into one of the (many) rigorous NY publics is a recipe for being shut out of T20 schools (unless the kid is a superstar).

While that's true about AP scores for senior year, the kids at this school are taking 3+ "AP classes" per year starting freshman year. They just don't report test scores.[/quote]

Again, name the school. You won’t be outing anyone, and those of us who actually know what we’re doing can do some research and see if you really know what you’re talking about or are reporting unsubstantiated gossip and just pulling numbers out of your ass.[/quote]

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