Washington – American high school sen iors took more than 1.5 million Advanced Placement exams last year, closing the gap with the SAT and dramatizing the rising influence of AP on school curricula, college admissions and assessment of schools and state education programs.
In its annual AP Report to the Nation on Tuesday, the College Board underlined the growing importance of AP relative to its other leading test, the SAT, by using AP results to rate each state’s success in preparing students for the AP exams in 35 subjects.
Unlike the SAT, whose 2.4 million college entrance tests for last year’s seniors is rivaled by the ACT’s 2.1 million tests, the AP is the only large supplier of exams that can earn college credit for U.S. high school students. Its rapid growth, with the number of AP tests tripling since 1995, has been praised by some educators as a way to invigorate low-performing high schools but criticized by others as putting too much pressure on students and forcing schools to teach subjects the AP way.
The 88-page report by the College Board emphasized the growing number of students, particularly minorities, whose success on AP tests is likely to increase their chances of graduating from college.
“A wider segment of the U.S. student population than ever before is achieving success on an AP exam before leaving high school,” the report said.
Nationally, 14.1 percent of graduating sen iors last year scored at least 3 out of 5 points, the level at which most colleges give some course credit, on at least one AP exam, compared with only 10.2 percent of seniors in 2000 who achieved what are considered passing scores, the report said.
The top five states in that category for the class of 2005 were New York, with 22.8 percent; Maryland, 21 percent; Utah, 20.5 percent; California, 19.7 percent; and Virginia, 19.3 percent.
Bob Schaeffer, director of public education for FairTest, a testing watchdog organization, said his group is not nearly as critical of AP as it is of the SAT, which it says is used too much by colleges to decide which students to admit.
The AP “is a gateway test, not a gatekeeping test,” Schaeffer said.
But, he added, there is a danger that the College Board will oversell the AP as a cure for American high schools’ ills.
