It’s happening everywhere—all across the country, schools are beginning to eliminate advanced placement courses—and Hackley is set to follow. For years, advanced placement classes, or APs, have provided students with a college-level curriculum that prepares them for later life and smooths the transition into college. So why would schools like Horace Mann, Masters, and now, Hackley, get rid of the AP program?
On the surface, this change may appear trivial, altering little about student life. However, it is important to consider, and there are certain drawbacks which lead one to conclude that Hackley should not rush to follow other schools, like Horace Mann, when it comes to removing valuable courses like the APs.
AP courses focus on in-depth understanding, not just memorization—they span a wide range of courses and ready students for a college level of rigor. However, as Mr. Arnold said, in an AP class, “you have control over the instruction, but it really has to be matched to line up with what the assessment is. So in some ways, teachers are teaching to the test.” Mr. Arnold also said that if “teaching to the test”, which is to say the AP exam, could be prevented, “we could actually have a more substantive, rigorous, and frankly, deep and more meaningful course that way.” There is also a time and review element to consider. During review classes, one does not cover new material—you are instead preparing for an exam. The thought in removing APs is that you also free up time for more teaching days.
However, this is not completely true. Initially, this may sound like a compelling argument, but the reality remains that many, even the majority, of students will still sit for AP tests, even though they won’t be taking the courses. This bolsters college applications, but at a cost. Since the school will not offer students support in preparing for these tests, students will have to further sacrifice time and money in their already busy extracurricular-packed schedules to study more outside of school. Additionally, while some students may be able to afford private tutors, others will not, creating a preventable roadblock to learning that unjustly complicates the whole situation.
What is more is that, as Mr. King said, “we’ve been talking about pairing a move away from APs with a move towards a semester schedule as well.”
The semester schedule will introduce courses that do not last the duration of the year. For example, Mr. King said, “Anatomy is superficially addressed in the AP biology curriculum. And if you’re a student who wants to study biology in college and maybe has an eye on the medical world, as a profession or a path, you’re not getting a ton of anatomy. So imagine if we had a class that was like advanced studies in human and animal anatomy, that you could take as a semester course.”
Classes would become more focused in an attempt to achieve deeper learning and prepare one for college, which, after all, is the point of high school. High school serves as a baseline for further education, helping you try new things and learn a wide variety of subjects. Making everything more focused takes away some of that, making learning less broad and more specific. How are high school students supposed to have figured out what they want to focus on and spend all their time doing? That is what college is for. By switching to a semester schedule and making a move towards more specific classes, one is moving away from very important foundational learning, and dedicating a lot of time towards something that they might decide later served no purpose to them, and which they don’t like.
APs are a valuable element of our Hackley student life, and we should be in no rush to get rid of them. They allow one to accurately measure academic readiness and prepare one for college, as well as for AP exams, which many will still take, even if they do not receive school support.
This move, paired with a semester schedule, will have a negative impact on student life.
