Health & Fitness
Advanced Placement Exam Performance Matters
His office chair is barely warm, and county schools Superintendent Joshua Starr is already getting on my nerves—talking gibberish about AP exam performance.
His office chair is barely warm, and Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr is already getting on my nerves.
Recently, when answering a question for The Gazette about the importance of AP exam scores, Starr came back with this gibberish:
“A student who takes the course and gets a 1 on the test does better in college than a student who doesn’t take the course and the test in the first place. AP and [International Baccalaureate], they help kids get the skills they need to succeed in college. By doing well in this class, regardless of how well he does on the test, it would serve him well in college. And that’s what AP and IB do for you. So I support those initiatives and I want to continue them.”
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Click here to read the entire Starr interview in The Gazette.
Now, it is true that AP exam-takers with scores of ‘1’ perform better in college than college undergraduates without an AP experience. Below are the college graduation rates arranged by AP score/grade and non-AP high school experience (note: high school students participating in joint dual enrollment programs--these are kids formally taking college classes while attending high school--have slightly higher graduation rates than students with AP scores of '1'). The numbers come directly from this 2008 College Board report:
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Type of high school experience
College graduation rate (Class of 2001)
AP course and exam score of 1
20.6%AP course and exam score of 2
AP course and exam score of 3
44.1%AP course and exam score of 4 or 5
50.4%AP course only
22.9%No AP course work
11.5%Dual high/college enrollment program
Clearly, the level of “better” here for kids scoring 1 was a pretty low better—a mere 20.6 percent of these kids graduate from college compared to 11.5 percent of the kids not taking an AP course. Is a 20 or 21 percent college graduation rate cause for excitement?
The college graduation rate for kids with AP scores of 4 and 5 was 50.4 percent. And the graduate rate for kids with AP scores of 3 was 44.1 percent. These numbers demonstrate that AP exam performance matters a lot—scoring a 3 or 4 or 5 radically increases the odds of college graduation.
Pretending that the AP exam score does not matter feels odd to me—sort of like telling kids playing sports that winning does not matter. Really!
Back in my day, winning always mattered, and frankly I think it still matters. So, shouldn’t we want all kids scoring 4s and 5s, especially when we know that that level of performance radically increases the odds of good outcomes?
