Anonymous wrote:These are college-level classes. You student should be studying at home, not being pushed over the finish line by the teacher.

Some teachers are good, and some are bad, but you won't see it in the test pass rate.

This is absolutely false - AP teacher

Lots of good points here, and I would add the following:

-You can find global AP scores by Googling that phrase and “Trevor Packer” who compiles them year. These scores will show some interesting patterns, especially over a decade or more, and can be useful to compare with school scores.

-I have taught AP Lit for 17 years and have consistently achieved some of the top scores in my school, my state, and I guess also the country. I can tell you that scoring well on the exam has gotten much easier over the years. Partly this is because of positive changes like using a more practical rubric, partly it’s smaller, more subtle tweaks. It’s not ever openly acknowledged but it’s very obvious to a veteran teacher—students, even top students, do not have the reading and writing skills they once did. Yet they consistently score much higher than they once did. Again, you can see this trend in the global scores. As much as I would like to say this is a result of improved teaching, it’s pretty obvious it’s not. I see what my students write all year, I score them honestly, and I know what they would have gotten on the exam 10 years ago.

-AP Classroom is a limited tool. I can teach the skills much better than the videos can, and in a much more engaging way. That’s not arrogance, that’s just what any decent in-person teacher can do, because most kids do not learn well from videos and online, as we know from the pandemic. I am concerned that some newer teachers rely on it way too heavily. Some of the videos I have watched are just pretty bad, to be honest.

—The best resource for students and teachers alike are the old test questions and scored student samples available on AP Central.

—It really helps if the teacher is both a good classroom instructor AND has deep knowledge in their field. I have a Masters degree in English, and continuing credits in education, not the other way around. Not to be a jerk, but the education classes I took were not rigorous and would not have prepared me to teach AP. Years of high level literary reading and demanding literary analysis assignments in undergrad and grad were what did that…

Sorry to write so much, but I think some of this might be helpful for parents to know.

And as I always say, we won’t get consistently top quality educators until we demand more, respect them more and pay them more. It’s how every other field works and education is no exception

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The information you want will be less useful than you think for many reasons

+100. For starters, more affluent schools will have higher pass rates across the board than poorer ones. The hardest AP Exams in a subject (e.g. Calc BC) will have much higher pass rates than the easier ones (Calc AB or AP Stats) because smarter, more diligent and better-prepared students take the harder classes. Exams taken by mostly underclassmen have higher scores than those taken by seniors because seniors DGAF once college aps are in. A teacher whose AP Gov section conflicts with AP Calc BC but not with Advanced Sports Nutrition will have all the jocks and worse scores than the AP Gov section that has the AP Calc BC kids.

NP who is an AP teacher and this is an absolutely fantastic response. I always try to tell students and parents this but they just can’t understand the nuances. Can you please come be the AP at my school?

+1

This comment is spot on. It needs to be included in every school’s student handbook!

In addition to all the comments above, courses that also offer Dual-Enrollment with a required AP exam will have students fill-in-the blank and not try, knowing they are already getting college credit. As results are not released until AFTER graduation, there is no way to combat this issue.

Anonymous wrote:The less prestigious high schools are also under pressure to put lower achieving students into APs for equity reasons. This can have a huge impact on AP scores. Kids often don’t bother to take the exam.

Or they take it and sleep through it, or stare in space like one of my students who did nothing second semester but for some bizarre reason decided to "take" the test.

Anonymous wrote:The less prestigious high schools are also under pressure to put lower achieving students into APs for equity reasons. This can have a huge impact on AP scores. Kids often don’t bother to take the exam.

So they won't affect the scores.

The less prestigious high schools are also under pressure to put lower achieving students into APs for equity reasons. This can have a huge impact on AP scores. Kids often don’t bother to take the exam.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The information you want will be less useful than you think for many reasons

+100. For starters, more affluent schools will have higher pass rates across the board than poorer ones. The hardest AP Exams in a subject (e.g. Calc BC) will have much higher pass rates than the easier ones (Calc AB or AP Stats) because smarter, more diligent and better-prepared students take the harder classes. Exams taken by mostly underclassmen have higher scores than those taken by seniors because seniors DGAF once college aps are in. A teacher whose AP Gov section conflicts with AP Calc BC but not with Advanced Sports Nutrition will have all the jocks and worse scores than the AP Gov section that has the AP Calc BC kids.

NP who is an AP teacher and this is an absolutely fantastic response. I always try to tell students and parents this but they just can’t understand the nuances. Can you please come be the AP at my school?

The number you need is how many students took the AP test and the score spread. Being in the class does not mean you took the test. At our local high school, in PA, many students choose the dual enrollment option for the AP classes. All of their work is graded by the high school AP teacher and then sent over to the community college to be certified by the teacher there. Then the grade is recorded at both the high school and at the community college. These students don't have to take the AP exam because they now have a college transcript showing that they took and passed with a grade at the community college. Therefore and AP class may have 25 students but only 15 took the AP exam.

GreatSchools.org now has AP tests taken and pass rate.

Which is why failing schools and the unions hate them.

Anonymous wrote:These are college-level classes. You student should be studying at home,

A bad teacher can make this difficult, for example by assigning excessive homework that's irrelevant to the scope of the AP course, or by not sharing the AP classroom material with students

These are college-level classes. You student should be studying at home, not being pushed over the finish line by the teacher.

Some teachers are good, and some are bad, but you won't see it in the test pass rate.

Anonymous wrote:Which district are you looking for? MCPS publishes by school. No one is going to publish by teacher or by class, even though they receive those scores.

Thanks. Was looking for FCPS but it would be interesting to see how MCPS presents the data. Do you have a link for MCPS by school?