Starting next year Dartmouth College will not allow incoming students to use Advanced Placement credits to earn academic credit toward a degree. According to a piece at Inside Higher Ed:
Advanced Placement courses might cover college-level content, but Dartmouth College has decided that’s not the same as taking a college course. So beginning with the class of 2018, the college will no longer grant credit based on its students’ AP test scores in high school.
Currently, students who enter Dartmouth with scores of four or five on the AP test, which is based on a five-point scale, can earn exemption from certain courses, placement into higher-level courses, or credit toward their degrees. (The exact reward for a high AP test score varies by department.) When the new policy takes effect, students will still be able to place out of an introductory level course or be exempted from certain requirements, but they will not be awarded any credits toward graduation. The policy was proposed by the college’s Committee on Instruction, and passed by an “overwhelming majority” of the faculty, says Hakan Tell, the committee’s chair.
This comes after the school ran an experiment in the psychology department with students who had earned five on the AP psychology test. Researchers had the students take the final examination for its Introduction to Psychology course and found that 90 percent failed.
Such research is not necessarily generalizable to Dartmouth courses or the AP program in general (perhaps the AP psychology test just isn’t that rigorous; that doesn’t mean the same is true for French or Calculus or biology) but it did lead the school to question how awarding credit works. Still, Dartmouth maintains that the AP program is valuable. As Tell put it:
We are not trying to discredit AP. That’s not the point. We think it’s still extremely useful and valuable for students to take in high school. We just don’t want to foster the idea in high school students that it is comparable to a college course.
Well yes, but it sort of does discredit the AP program, since it is designed specifically to be comparable to a college courses and allow students to gain college credit while still in high school.
Over time, however, AP has essentially developed into a sorting mechanism for college admissions. High school students take a lot of AP courses so they look impressive to colleges. Colleges, unsurprisingly, have discovered that AP credits don’t really indicate any particularly advanced mastery of collegiate level work but, rather, just mean the high school students are smart and hard working.
