AP exams are back to normal this year; is that a bad thing?

I’m having a friendly argument with Pete Bavis, a fellow supporter of the college-level Advanced Placement program in high schools. He is the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at the much-admired high school district in Evanston, Ill. — Evanston Township High School District 202.

I think the return of full-length AP testing is good for American education. About 2.7 million students this spring are taking 4.8 million of the three-hour-plus exams, full of demands for analysis and critical thinking. The exams motivate AP students and teachers to do their best work.

Bavis disagrees with me. He thinks this is a bad year to give kids hard tests. He says the trauma of the pandemic, especially for disadvantaged students, will outweigh any of the academic advantages of studying for AP.

I suspect many educators agree with him. In a well-argued piece for Education Week, he said college credit should be awarded this year based on how

AP teachers judge the quality of student class work, and not on the results of the year-end AP exams written and graded by outside experts.

I haven’t heard the College Board call the year normal, but the desire to take its exams has shown remarkable resilience during the pandemic. After the coronavirus forced schools to close in February and March 2020, AP exams given in May that year were reduced to just 45 minutes of free response questions done online at home.

Despite the disruption, the number of students participating in 2020 was only 6.5 percent less than in 2019. The number taking full AP exams this year either digitally or on paper at schools or homes is expected to be just 2.2 percent less than 2019. A College Board survey of all AP teachers last summer found 80 percent wanted to return to the full exams. Fourteen percent wanted the 2021 exams canceled.

The much smaller International Baccalaureate and Cambridge International college-level course programs in high schools canceled their independently graded exams last year. This year, their schools have the choice of using the independent final exams or evaluating each student based on class work.

Bavis said he wishes that choice had also been offered by AP. He told me that would have provided “a real opportunity to test the validity of AP course grades as a proxy for college credit this year.” If students who earned college credit through grades given by their teachers did as well in college as those who gained credit by taking the independent AP exams, that might lead to changes in the AP credit system.

Bavis said in his Education Week piece that “success on AP exams can mean shaving off a semester or two of pricey college tuition. The College Board knows this and markets the AP exam as a game-changer for students, particularly students of color. And their marketing has worked.” He noted that the cost per exam was $94, and so 4.7 million exams added up “to nearly half a billion dollars.”

I like Bavis’s plan to find ways other than AP tests to encourage deep learning. Many people agree with him that standardized testing has gone too far. There are enough of his students admitted to college in December to use them as a control group. Ask them to skip AP exams in the spring and see how they do in university courses the following year.

That might be difficult in schools like Evanston Township High, where AP is part of youth culture. Some academic stars may be traumatized if they don’t get to take the exams.

This is one of many issues raised by the pandemic that will take time to resolve.