The AP Myth

A very lovely woman whose eldest child was still in middle school said Wow. Kara is taking 5 AP courses and plays varsity field hockey too? She is going to be sooo prepared for college!

I didn’t quite know how to respond. Because what I knew for sure was that there was absolutely no nexus between AP courses and college study.

Kara was not going to be soo prepared.

And my point may be proven with just a little bit of math:

The average college course meets for 3 hours a week for 15 weeks. There is typically one midterm and one final with perhaps 2 or 3 quizzes in between. Often one fifteen page, or 2 or 3 eight-page papers are mandated for course completion. In addition to textbook reading, another 300 page fiction or non-fiction book may be thrown into the mix.

In contrast, an AP course in the high school is given for approximately 4 ½ hours per week for 34 weeks. There is a midterm and a final (sometimes not) with weekly quizzes and bi-weekly exams in between. There is hardly ever any written paper at all and the required reading (if any) is completed before the course even begins along with other “packets” of material (amounting to another 10 or 20 hours worth of study)  designed to give a “headstart.”

So essentially, merely in terms of  measure with absolutely no consideration to rigor at all —an AP course calculates out to be nearly 3 times the instructional time of a college course for the exact same amount of academic material.

An AP course is not even close to a college course.

And so Kara, like all her classmates at the high school, would have no clue what to be prepared for.

But Kara’s sisters who came before her did.

Both Samantha and Briana under the policy of a different Superintendent of Schools took college courses at NCC the summer before their senior year—Health and Calculus I (respectively). They understood concentrated rigor and study—even if the setting was a community college. So even though they only took 3 AP courses (offerings and scheduling did not allow for more) in their senior year to Kara’s 5 APs, Kara was by no means better prepared.

AP courses are merely glorified (and sometimes not even as rigorous as) high school honor classes. They are an apple to a university’s orange.

And ultimately I thanked the nice woman who held Kara in such high regard. I chose not to dispel the myth of AP classes that so captivated her. It was neither the time nor the place to bring her up to speed. I hoped (as she was a very bright woman) that she might possibly figure out the AP ruse out all on her own. And I hoped that she would do so before her own daughter tearfully called on week 3 of her daughter’s first college semester to say Mom—I have so much work to do. Why is it so hard?

Because the only response the mother can give her sobbing daughter is Because you were ill-prepared.