Assessing APs

Change is a constant in any system, but Stuyvesant has gone through change at an unexpectedly drastic pace over the past several years, much of it surrounding Advanced Placement (AP) and honors classes.

Take, for instance, the freshman course offerings: in their time at the school, current upperclassmen have seen the number of non-Regents social studies courses go from three—AP Human Geography, Advanced Topics in (AT) Global History, and Big History—to one: AP Human Geography. In the science department, meanwhile, two AP courses, AP Environmental Science and AP Biology, were offered to freshmen last year. This marked a dramatic change from just two years ago, when there was only a Topics in Biology course for freshmen who had taken Regents Biology in middle school, and a Biology Research course for particularly invested students during the spring semester.

While changes have proliferated most among the freshman course offerings, their reach is schoolwide: a sophomore can now take AP Chemistry, every junior is automatically enrolled in AP Physics 1 this year, and every senior is now required to take some form of AP Calculus. Meanwhile, some language students have seen non-AP courses in their language become inaccessible and have found themselves forced into AP courses to fulfill the three-year language requirement.

The upshot of all this is twofold: one, AP courses have become more accessible: underclassmen have more AP options, particularly in the sciences (previously, the only AP courses available for underclassmen had been three social studies courses: Human Geography, World History, and European History), and every junior will have the opportunity to take an AP course. Two, AP courses have become more mandatory and less avoidable, while some non-AP honors courses, such as AT Global History, have been squeezed out.

However, despite these positive aspects, the change creates more problems than it solves. While it opens up more APs for more students, it also pushes students who may not have a particular aptitude in a given field into a class they are neither interested in nor prepared to take. This jeopardizes the core appeal of AP classes, which is not the AP name or the AP test but rather the environment in which a group of people passionate about a subject convene to advance their knowledge in a space full of students with similar interests. Students who would not have been able to take an AP class are now mandated to do so, which benefits neither the student who is being put in that position nor his or her counterparts who may be more interested in the field.

One argument to counter the idea that students are not prepared for the mandatory APs is that the teachers were already teaching at the AP level, and to change the course to an AP is only a name change. However, if this is the case, the purported benefit of getting more students involved in fields such as engineering is moot; the change merely means that students will now take the AP exam. In addition, mandatory APs still have the homework cap of one hour rather than the normal half hour for non-AP courses. This in itself shows that it is more than a name change, as students are being signed up for a potential half an hour of extra homework a night for little practical benefit. This could be remedied by requiring that non-mandatory AP classes abide by the 30 minutes of homework non-AP classes are supposed to abide by.

Ultimately, all rationales provided for the increase in the number of required APs fail to adequately explain the change, leaving open the question as to what the real reason is. There are two distinct possibilities: one, this is a genuine but misguided attempt at improving the academic rigor and appeal of Stuyvesant; or two, that the move is solely motivated by a desire to improve the school’s ranking by having more students take AP classes.

If it is the latter, it warrants serious reevaluation, as it seems to prioritize the school’s status over the well-being of the student body. If it is the former, the premise needs to be scrutinized more closely. Is an AP class always a more academically intense experience than a non-AP class? The jury is out on that question; take, for example, AP Physics 1. As compared to the Honors Physics curriculum, AP Physics 1 covers fewer topics and requires less reliance on math. AP Physics 1 may be an exception, but it certainly questions the assumption that all AP classes will necessarily be richer than their “regular” counterparts.

While the rate of change at Stuyvesant concerning AP courses suggests that the administration is willing and eager to make bold moves, it also requires an ability to evaluate and monitor the effects of the changes. First, we urge the administration to examine the effects of offering AP classes to freshmen and sophomores, and of requiring juniors and seniors to take AP Physics 1 and AP Calculus, respectively. If the evidence suggests that these initiatives have not yielded positive results for students, the administration should not maintain these offerings for the sole purpose of achieving a higher ranking. Second, AP classes demand committing more time and energy than a regular or honors class requires, and taking a nationally administered exam. Therefore, students should be able to opt into these classes only if they have a passion for the subject matter. Stuyvesant’s motto is Pro Scientia Atque Sapientia—for knowledge and wisdom. Making passion a prerequisite for AP courses will help promote both.