Saul Geiser and Veronica Santelices, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California at Berkeley
2004
This report questions the large role that AP classes play in admissions to elite colleges and universities and finds that "the number of AP and honors courses taken in high school bears little or no relationship to students' later performance in college." Colleges will often weigh students' AP courses through a point system or "holistically," regardless of whether they took the corresponding exam. The authors conclude that, while AP test scores correlate with college success, simply passing an AP course does not. Because of the admissions advantage of taking AP classes, many high schools feel pressured to "offer more advanced courses than they are able to support adequately with trained teachers and other resources." This means that students can receive good grades in an AP-labeled class yet not achieve at AP standards. Also, the system of adding points for AP classes (an A in an AP class typically yields 5 points instead of 4, a B confers 4 instead of 3, and so on) can inflate students' GPA - the mean GPA of freshmen admitted to Berkeley is an astonishing 4.31. Many students in poor districts can't realistically achieve this GPA because of the lack of AP courses. The report, however, studies Cal-Berkeley students; would there be a different outcome for them at a less selective school? Students at less prestigious schools who took an AP course in high school might be better off than the larger number of students who didn't. But as the authors stress, this study is focused on "the use of AP and other honors-level coursework as a criterion for admission at elite colleges and universities." And for that, it provides convincing evidence that a reassessment is in order. You can read the report here.
