College Board drops AP comp sci & latin for racial diversity reasons

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/04/09/32ap.h27.html

by Alex3917 • 18 years ago

25 76 18 years ago

edgeztv• 18 years ago

Cutting these exams certainly won't get more minority students involved in these subjects. Seems like a crude hack to improve the College Board's diversity ratings. One is led to believe that they do not care about the students at all from this statement.

shawndrost3• 18 years ago

Other articles indicate that the test was unprofitable: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04...

Edit: "In the 2007 administration, 5,064 students took the exam." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science#Grade_distr...

amichail6• 18 years ago

Was this a strong computer science class?

Maybe it's best if students see less badly taught computer science while in high school?

subwindow3• 18 years ago

It was really good. I took it 6 years ago and even though I continued on to a non-CS degree, I still feel like I have a good grasp on basic CS topics (data structures, in particular).

This is a really terrible loss. I don't get it at all.

andreyf2• 18 years ago

You're thinking of the BC test - the AB test doesn't cover data structures - just basic OOP (Java flavor) and the general gist of Big-O notation.

mkull2• 18 years ago

I took AP Comp Sci in high school back 2000. It was a great c++ class and really gave me headstart in the CS program when I went off to college. Of course I benefited by having a great teacher,

In actuality, my enjoyment of that class solidified my decision at the time to major in CS when I went to college.

Sad to see it go, I think it is a big mistake to cut it.

amichail6• 18 years ago

C++ isn't a good way to introduce people to CS. An introductory class should pick a language that doesn't get in the way so much.

shawndrost3• 18 years ago

I took AP comp sci AB, and later TA'd the class. It was surprisingly good, covering lots of fundamental data structures and some mean pointer logic, and it probably changed the course of my life. It's disgusting to see it killed for the purposes of optimizing College Board Inc's race statistics. (Assuming this article is accurate.)

bilbo0s2• 18 years ago

I agree with that, teach computer scientists mathematics while they are in high school, NOT CS. Have any other mathematicians out there had to review mathematically intense papers written by CS students. Frightening isn't it! How about we update the whole AP system and bring it into the 21st century.

AP Chinese or Japanese Literature courses are still being debated, but we were teaching Italian Lit?

I think we should start giving our brightest young men a larger dose of mathematics and Asia. They will work the rest out on their own if we give them good fundamentals.

Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US. This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school. AP should expect more, at least differential equations, and I myself would be more comfortable if AP required Advanced Calculus, (Real Analysis).

Some people think I expect too much. To them I would say look at the numbers. China has more HONOR students than the US has STUDENTS, even when we include the drop outs. Keep in mind that includes only their TOP students, their 'B' students are excluded from that count, and a 'B' student in China would be an honor student here. The luxury of educational tracking as we have known it is one that is too expensive for us going forward. Time to raise the bar. It is going to be increasingly difficult to address this issue through immigration. Education is the only way out. All hands on deck. We should start to do what it takes to get this done.

amichail6• 18 years ago

What's wrong with immigration? Don't many excellent Asian students want to move to the US?

dgabriel• 18 years ago

I hate to be stickler, but bright young women take these courses, too.

wanorris• 18 years ago

> Incidentally, the idea that Calculus is an AP course is indicative of the challenges facing education in the US.

Most colleges offer H.S. Algebra II-level courses to incoming freshmen -- nevermind requiring high school students to take calculus to graduate.

> This course, and all of the math up to it, should be required to graduate high school.

My guess is that all we would be accomplishing is reducing the high school graduation rate. The only way it would be worthwhile to require calculus to graduate from high school is if we created a two-track high school system and started sending non-college-track kids to vocational school.

In any case, I would say that if we were going to revise the high school math curriculum, we should add a year of probability and statistics, not more calculus, especially (god forbid) differential equations. Possibly by shifting "Algebra I" into junior high school coursework, or by making Geometry an elective. I strongly suspect that the fundamentals of probability would be a lot more useful to most people than Euclidean geometry.

Having high school kids take DiffEqs would do more to make kids hate math than anything I can imagine.

krschultz2• 18 years ago

The problem with teaching ODEs is that some people just are not motivated to learn that stuff. Why would a business man need to know differential equations?

I bet this country would be a lot better off teaching Econ 101 to every student graduating than teaching differential equations, or even Calculus. Who needs to know Calc? Math, Science, and Engineering majors. Some business and finance majors, but not all. That is not the majority of people in college must less the country. Yet everyone should understand the country's economy a bit better. I have always found a lot of smart people do not understand the actual demographics of the country because they only see the people around them, who are in fact also smart people. Realize that the country is largely made up of people who have never gotten closer to high math than what they see on the blackboards in movies like Good Will Hunting, and could care less.

Also consider most education majors never are required to get past Calc 1, who would teach it?

I'm all for offering it, I took Calc in high school and I know other engineers who took ODEs in high school, but requiring any more than Calc 1 in high school makes no sense to me.

klutometis• 18 years ago

I find this trend disturbing; but am at a loss as to how to formulate a politically blameless response. Suffice to say, the converse is inconceivable; and I fail to see how limiting the choices of minorities or majorities serves either.

_h4xr6• 18 years ago

It's not a choice of just arbitrarily selecting some level of success for various minorities. Some minorities excel, and you can either allow it or make everyone worse off by banning it. For example, someone who cares about racial equality might demand that blacks be prevented from competing in national sports, or standup comedy, or political oratory, because they tend to excel in these areas. This would deprive us of lots of great entertainers and speakers, and it would create a more equal situation. But obviously the black people don't benefit (they lose the jobs they want and otherwise would have); the white audiences don't benefit (they get worse stuff to watch and hear); and even the whites and other minorities who get the positions reserved for them suffer -- they're out of their depth, and the painful difference between their talent and their ranking makes them even less successful than they otherwise would be.

This might have some sort of application to affirmative action schemes, or the efforts to sculpt a course so it somehow doesn't discriminate among the groups that are better or worse at it. But I'm not sure what that application might be.

pmorici• 18 years ago

"“For us, [the question is], are we able to achieve our mission of reaching a broader range of students?” Mr. Packer said."

If that isn't an ironic statement I don't know what is. The best way to reach a broader range is to reach less? Maybe the AP needs a course offering in logic.

scott_s• 18 years ago

When funds are limited, you have to justify the cost of something with its reward. This isn't an issue of "Not enough people are taking these courses, so let's cull them." It's an issue of "We're spending a lot of money on very few students. We can probably use that money to help more students."

I'm a CS PhD student. I think it's terrible that they have to cut some CS AP classes. But I also understand that they have a limited budget, and a mandate to help as many students as possible with that budget. It's easy to criticize them for cutting classes we think are valuable, but we aren't faced with the problem of trying to use a finite budget to cover classes in the sciences, math, history, literature, languages and the arts.

Alex39178• 18 years ago

The average 13-year-old white student scores better on the SATs than the average 17-year-old black student.[1] This places minority students at a huge and completely arbitrary disadvantage, since the SAT doesn't correlate with academic performance at all beyond a slight correlation with GPA the first semester of freshman year in college.[2]

And yet somehow I doubt the College Board is going to drop the SAT anytime soon. Dropping AP classes "for racial diversity reasons" is like making Rosa Parks the TV spokeswoman in the front to mask the secret eugenics program going on in the back.

[1] It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform [2] C.f. the academic research into the validity of the SAT on the College Board website. (There have been plenty of popular press articles written on this too.)

pg2• 18 years ago

Is it really true that SAT scores don't correlate with academic performance?

amichail6• 18 years ago

Political correctness has a way of distorting reality for many people :)

Actually, it's more likely that political correctness creates a chasm between what people say and what they really think.

attack• 18 years ago

Well finger length correlates with better SAT scores. I propose that finger length measurement replace SAT testing.

http://www.livescience.com/health/070522_finger_sats.html

Although I myself did well on the SAT's, I too am hesitant to support the use of correlations like these in determining what students, or anyone deserves.

With regard to SATs and academic performance, the first google result:

"Findings indicated a very low correlation between SAT math scores and overall college math grades of six graduating classes at one university"

http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetai...

zurla• 18 years ago

"Various studies conducted over the lifetime of the SAT show a statistically significant increase in correlation of high school grades and freshman grades when the SAT is factored in." from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT

Alex39178• 18 years ago

Unfortunately the College Board changed the information architecture scheme on their website a couple of years ago so the URLs from my class notes no longer resolve.

There is one study that shows there is a correlation between SAT score and college GPA, but only for students whose HS GPA is above a 4.0. In general though the test doesn't really have any validity.

Here is a link to the studies the College Board is promoting:

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/...

EDIT: http://www.fairtest.org/facts/satvalidity.html

Jesin• 18 years ago

The real question is, how does "academic performance" correlate with actual proficiency? In AP Computer Science, probably not much. I'm taking the test soon (trying to skip the course and go on to fun stuff). At least half the review book is about the Java standard class library. Much of the remainder is Java syntax and semantics and the brain-damaged system that Java programmers call "good object-oriented design". Oh, and another thing: chapter 5 of the review book has a section called "The Software Development Life Cycle". The first subsection of that is titled "The Waterfall Model". After explaining the waterfall model, it proceeds to completely neglect the existence of any other software development model.

One of the most noticeable differences between A and AB is that in AB, you go into algorithms and big O notation in much more depth, and you do some work with implementations of binary trees and such. When they cut out AB, they are leaving what is essentially an AP Introduction to Java.

It's sad that this passes off as computer science. I'm taking the test so I can hopefully skip the course and move on to fun stuff that has APCS as a prerequisite. Fun stuff like AI. AI, the class where Python and Ruby are the default languages, and you get to use other things if you want, like Lisp.

(I found this out when I still didn't know much about Lisp, saw someone using it, and laughed at the stupid, old language with all the parentheses. The guy tried to explain that Lisp is a good language, but I wasn't convinced. Later I independently stumbled on some of PG's essays, and I was convinced.)

jsackmann• 18 years ago

"The average 13-year-old white student scores better on the SATs than the average 17-year-old black student."

Thanks for the citation, but since I can't look up the book right now, perhaps you can answer a question. Is that really measuring the "average?" Or the average score of 13-year-old white students who are taking the test? That's a very biased sample; for instance, I took the test when I was 12 only because I seemed likely to qualify for the Center for Talented Youth.

Alex39178• 18 years ago

Check out page 10: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0815736398/ref=sib_dp_pt#rea...

Unfortunately I don't have my copy on me so I can't look up the footnote in the back. IIRC it was the SAT, but I'm not entirely positive.

If you want to see something really telling about standardized testing though, check out this Greg Palast article on how the NCLB discriminates against minorities:

http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/nation/13968-no-child-left-...

_h4xr6• 18 years ago

" since the SAT doesn't correlate with academic performance at all beyond a slight correlation with GPA "

Did you know that weight doesn't correlate very well with linebacker performance in the NFL? It could be that a 350-pounder is just as effective as a 150-pounder, and there's some pro-fat discrimination -- or it could be that you're talking about correlation within a school, which chooses people on the basis of multiple criteria including SATs, such that their students are about equal academically.

Consider: a school could look at two people, one of whom gets a perfect math SAT and a 500 verbal, and another of whom gets 600 on each and writes a killer admissions essay. The former student gets a 3.5 focusing on math and CS. The latter gets a 3.5 taking English and Philosophy. This is the kind of evidence schools find; that people play to their strengths, so as long as they're of similar average talent, they'll have similar success, even if an individual measure of that talent doesn't correlate with their relative success among people who by the average of many measures, are very similar.

This has been a well-known problem with the studies you cite for over a decade.

MaysonL• 18 years ago

re [1] - the actual statement from the book is: -- By age 17, the average test scores for minority students are no higher than the average scores for white 13-year-olds.

Note that the book is written about, and the comment refers to, <em>schools in large cities</em>.

aston4• 18 years ago

The racial diversity bit is clearly a red-herring.

phony_identity• 18 years ago

"Mr. Packer said the decision was made principally because of demographic considerations.

Only a tiny fraction of the members of underrepresented minority groups who take AP exams take the tests in one of those four affected subject areas, he said.

The College Board has made it a priority to reach such students, including those who are African- American and Hispanic."

Alex39178• 18 years ago

I disagree. There are really two separate stories here:

1) Four AP courses are being discontinued

2) High schools are are redesigning their curriculums and dropping classes in which minorities are either doing poorly or have no interest in taking. (I know that just because there is no longer an AP test for these subjects doesn't mean that schools are obligated to stop teaching the material, but many or perhaps even most of them will. Esp. since high schools are ranked by Newsweek solely based on the number of AP tests taken divided by the number of students.)

In the long run, I think story #2 is vastly more important than story #1.

amichail6• 18 years ago

Why do you care so much? In the long run, if there's a problem that threatens US world dominance then it will be corrected.

_h4xr6• 18 years ago

You should be careful about that "minorities" thing. Jews and Asians are minorities whose test scores are above the national average -- I think they would be very surprised to find that their collective underperformance was somehow an issue.

I think this kind of debate won't be fruitful as long as we're afraid to say precisely what we mean, and have to talk about 'diversity' or 'minorities'. Look at the Harvard math department: http://www.math.harvard.edu/people/senior.html . You've got Gottleib and Hironaka and McMullen and Yau and basically all the proof you need that they are pulling successful people from many backgrounds. They have a higher fraction of actual minorities than the rest of the country!

keating• 18 years ago

So the issue is a race condition.

patrickg-zill• 18 years ago

That's OK, the homeschoolers of today will be around in 10 years to start companies and employ the others... if anything, you would think that AP Latin would be easier for someone with a decent background in Spanish, as there is much similarity.

daniel-cussen• 18 years ago

Totally. Latin for Latin Americans.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

An extremely minor offense, considering the range of things that have been done in the name of holy diversity.

danielha• 18 years ago

I went to high school in the Silicon Valley. AP Computer Science was a course offered to upperclassmen. It was discontinued the year I had intended to take it.

Instead, one of the new classes offered that fall was a dance class.

nickb• 18 years ago

Another gigantic win for the US educational system. US system is so far ahead of other countries' systems that they can afford to drop few useless courses.

/sarcasm

andreyf2• 18 years ago

I don't know about the language tests, but CS AB was pretty worthless - the are two of them, the "AB test" and the "BC test" (not to be confused with Calc, which has the "Calc A" and "Calc B" tests). CS AB mostly came down to learning basic Java flavored OOP. Most of the time is spent on Java syntax and searching for missing semicolons. The BC test actually gets into some meaningful data structures and efficiency, but is still not really worthwhile.

In general, education seems to me to have very little to do with schooling, and a lot to do with culture. Most of my "really smart" friends learned on their own or from their parents. The ones who focus on learning things in class just can't keep up with the self-motivators.

yters3• 18 years ago

The great thing about merit based society is that non merit based societies crumble under their own incompetence. As long as the meritocracy can avoid getting sucked down with the incompetents, it will rise to the top. If it doesn't, is it really a meritocracy?

pchristensen• 18 years ago

AP CompSci was my favorite class in high school. It wasn't particularly challenging, but it made me hate high school a whole lot less.

College Board drops AP comp sci & latin for racial diversity reasons

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