Thursday, February 21, 2013

"More colleges stop giving credit for AP exams"

I have to admit mixed feelings about this (from Marketplace):
Yet despite all the hard work, students like Brown may not be able to place out of required college courses or even skip freshman year if they score well on the AP tests. Some prestigious colleges have stopped giving academic credit for AP tests scores.

Brown doesn’t. Columbia doesn’t, and most recently, Dartmouth said it won’t let AP students skip ahead.

“We want a Dartmouth education to take place at Dartmouth,” says school spokesman Justin Anderson.
...

Conley says prestigious schools can afford to be picky about what credits to accept. But there are “more general admissions schools where they want students to bring AP credits and they do want to reward them for doing that.” In other words, AP credit is like bait for the best students.
For various reason, I've always preferred CLEP to AP as a method of testing out and as for advanced classes, I tend to favor plans that actually allow students to attend college classes while in high school, but of the choices we normally see, AP is certainly better than many and I very much support the idea of testing out of lower level courses.

I'm sure there are some exceptionally good freshman level courses at Brown, Columbia and company but that section of Cal I would have to be pretty impressive to justify the expense, the time and the opportunity costs (I sure there's an even better course the student could use to fill that time).

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