One of the most frequent reactions to the AP question relates to the perceived impact on college admission. This is a natural concern among those who are familiar with the history of the APs, when the fact of their scarcity caused them to stand out across a student’s transcript. However, the proliferation of APs over the past thirty years has been followed by a corresponding decline in their stature, along with the college credits they guarantee. As the Progressive Policy Institute has noted “while the number of students taking AP exams grows, colleges and universities are making it increasingly difficult for them to get actual college credit. Eighty-six percent of the top 153 universities and colleges in the United States restrict the awarding of AP credit, denying students hundreds of millions in tuition savings. Only a handful of colleges deny AP credit altogether, but many others restrict the granting of credits”

Further, a growing list of colleges restrict the number of subject areas where advanced standing is awarded, and many schools, including CalTech, Dartmouth, Brown, Williams, Amherst, Harvey Mudd, and Colby, do not award any credit at all. Similarly, UCLA and UC Berkeley recently decided to stop awarding general education credit for AP. Not surprisingly, a growing list of independent schools have departed from the program, in favor of their own advanced curricula that has led to more sophisticated programming and more competitive college admissions.

As Marilyn McGrath-Lewis, former Director of Admissions at Harvard University said, “We look at whether the applicant has taken the high school’s most demanding courses. But whether the classes are designated AP or not is irrelevant. Abolishing the AP classes won’t hurt the kids.” Shawn Abbott, the former Director of Admissions at Stanford noted in an interview with Independent Curriculum that at “…places where the curriculum is seen as more innovative and risk-taking…often have the intellectual vitality that we seek. The absence of AP courses at these schools doesn’t hinder their chances for admission to highly selective colleges and universities in any way.”

Further, the presence of an AP program too often prevents schools from integrating high-impact instructional practices that facilitate genuine learning and meaningful assessment. As the National Research Council has noted, the APs have “failed to keep pace with research on how people learn; instead of listening to lecture, more real learning takes place if students spend more time going into greater depth on fewer topics, allowing them to experience problem-solving, controversies and the subtleties of scholarly investigation.” 

Independent schools like Kehillah empower highly qualified faculty to create meaningful and challenging curriculum that allows students to distinguish themselves through the courses they select. While we appreciate the value of AP courses and the challenge many of them provide, we have looked closely at the potential impact our plan could have on the college application process, and we anticipate the impact to be uniformly positive.

Testimonials and Reflections from Experts on Advanced Placement

“At the end of the day, we encourage students, guidance counselors, and parents to choose together those courses, regardless of title, that have the most rigorous intellectual discovery and exploration as their goal.  We believe such a course load will excite the student as much as it impresses a college, will inspire classmates more than intimidate them, and will ask each student to open her mind more often than she opens an examination book.”

- Robin Mamlet, Former Dean of Admissions, Stanford University 

“’Learning is about having a passion… The threat is that students are so concerned with how they appear to the colleges that they pack in all sorts of AP courses that may not even interest them.’”

- Myra McGovern, Spokeswoman, National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), as quoted by Time Magazine 

“Critics say the looming year-end test creates too much pressure to cover every last topic that might appear on the exam, and doesn’t allow teachers flexibility to zero in on topics of particular interest or relevance.”

– Anne Marie Chaker in Wall Street Journal, “Elite High Schools Drop AP Courses” 

“…Educators are worried that AP… is turning into something it was never meant to be: a kind of alternative high school curriculum for ambitious students that teaches to the test instead of encouraging the best young minds to think more creatively.”

– Claudia Wallis and Carolina A. Miranda in Time Magazine, “How Smart is AP?”

“At Connecticut, we seek candidates who have challenged themselves within the context of their school’s offerings.  How those courses are labeled is unimportant.  That a student has taken a rigorous course load and performed well, is important.”

– Martha C. Merrill, Dean of Admissions & Financial Aid, Connecticut College

“We applaud such efforts to open [up] classroom discussion and learning from a ‘standardized’ curriculum.”

– Deren Finks, Former V.P., Dean of Admissions, Harvey Mudd College

“The case against AP consists mainly of what good teachers know in their bones about education: that students learn best when they can immerse themselves in hands-on work, and that the best learning involves genuine discovery rather than the mere ferreting out of information already hidden away in the teacher’s brain.”

– Bruce G. Hammond, Director of College Counseling, Sandia Prep in Education Week

“If high schools decide that the AP curriculum doesn’t serve them well… then what selective colleges are looking for is some indication of the relative rigor of the classes.” 

– Christoph Guttentag, Director of Undergraduate Admissions, Duke University, in Wall Street Journal, “Elite High Schools Drop AP Courses”