High school students across the nation are bulking up their course schedules, putting new meaning into the "old college try," but are they leaving enough on their plates for their actual college years?
As college admissions officers put greater emphasis on high-level coursework, students have reacted by piling on Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses.
Fifty years ago, only about 1,000 students took the annual AP exams. At the time, those exams were nearly exclusively for the top "college-prep" students in high school.
Today, AP courses have been assimilated into the mainstream high school setting and over 1.1 million students took AP tests last year, according to the Associated Press. Indeed, one out of every three high school graduates has taken at least one AP test.
Such classes are becoming an unavoidable hurdle on the path towards acceptance into top colleges, though the admissions process often places a greater emphasis on course loads than on the exams themselves, explained Lewis Stival, Dean of College Counseling at Blair Academy in New Jersey.
"Many students can't even submit scores in time for admissions review when they take exams their senior year," Stival said. "Instead, the real importance is that higher level courses indicate to admissions [boards] that a student is taking the most challenging course possible."
At Tufts, the number of entering freshmen who have taken AP, IB or foreign diploma courses increases every year. Tufts awards different acceleration credits based on how students score on their final course exams.
But it is questionable whether college-prep courses in high school are actually equivalent to college courses.
"There are people like me who [because of exemption as a result of AP courses] don't have to take English 1 or English 2 and still aren't quite sure how to write a good paper," sophomore and IB graduate Carrie Davis said.
And though college-prep achievements can place students out of introductory courses at Tufts, the high school learning environment is often completely different from that at college.
Comparing her high school classes to Tufts' courses, Davis said "the information is basically the same, but the way in which we learned it was different. Take psychology, for example. I had [a class of] 20 people every day compared to a 300-person lecture meeting twice a week," she said. "Learning study habits for a college class is something we didn't get in IB."
Still, AP credits have helped Davis in the sense that she could skip immediately to higher-level courses in subjects she found most interesting at Tufts. "I got credit when I did well in the classes I liked [in high school], such as English and French."
Additionally, high schools use different methods to prepare their students for college, raising issues of fairness.
"I know some schools will encourage their kids to take AP classes, but my school didn't do that," sophomore Eli Hackel said. "But of the 20 percent that make it into our AP classes [after applying], 90 percent will get fives on the exams."
One result of the college-prep course proliferation may be that students entering college have more advanced skills than before. Assistant Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Taliaferro said that over his past seven years of teaching, each entering class has been better at writing than the last.
Tufts currently offers credits for high scores on a variety of AP tests ranging from Computer Science to Hebrew to Psychology. A student scoring a five on the AP Biology test, for example, receives one course credit and placement into either Bio 13 or 14.
Tufts also allows students who have earned four to 7.5 AP or IB credits to obtain one semester's advanced standing and those earning eight credits or more to obtain one year's advanced standing.
As a result, some schools have started de-emphasizing high-school course credits and exemptions for economic reasons, Stival said. "Basically, colleges and universities have started losing money as a result of credits and exemptions," he said. "It used to be that a student could save up to a year's worth of tuition" by receiving high scores on AP exams.
Students at Tufts are not eligible to receive their credits, however, until they have completed two years on the Hill.
High scores on college prep course tests also can fulfill Tufts' course requirements. A four on the AP English test, for example, can be transferred into one Tufts credit and an exemption from one semester of the school's writing requirement.
Tufts' policies on awarding credit are nearly identical to other colleges in the area. Benchmark schools such as Georgetown University and Brown University are also very specific about credit offered for AP scores, allotting credit for only certain advanced high school courses.
Whether or not they are truly beneficial, the current government seems to find college-prep courses a success: President George W. Bush has expressed his wish to double federal spending on the Advanced Placement program to $51.5 million. The additional spending will expand course access for poorer school districts and will increase teacher training.
Stival noted that the importance of scores vary a great deal from university to university.
