After hours of public comment at the November 22 WW-P Board of Education Meeting, it is clear that the public did not agree with the proposed changes to the course selection process. But with over 1,800 class waivers, it is also clear that the current process is not the most effective method. So what is?
The problem with the original revision proposal is that it relied too much on data. An A in a college prep class does not equal a B in a honors/AP course. If you take for example a high school junior’s American history choices, he can take either AP U.S. or American Studies II (honors or college prep). The AP U.S. curriculum goes from 1492 to the present, whereas the AS II curriculum starts from the Progressive Era. If you look at how much information students learn in tyears, an AP student will learn 519 years of material whereas an AS II student will cover less than a fifth of that. Therefore, one can assume that an AP student learns about 500 percent more than an AS II student. If you apply the grading scale to this calculation, an A student in the AS II class will still only learn at most 20 percent of material that an A student in AP can learn. But a C student in the AP class will learn about 350 percent of the material that an AS II student will learn.
It is clear that though the “unsuccessful” AP student may have a lower GPA than his AS II peer, he will have retained more knowledge than his counterpart. Now what if both these students want to apply to College X? Because College X realizes the large disparities between AP and college prep classes, they might see a high C in an AP course as equal to an A in a college prep course. Both these students will then be accepted to College X, but the AP student will be more successful because he has learned over three times more information than the AS II student.
These calculations are not 100 percent accurate. They only show that measuring a student’s success through data is not as easy as number crunchers lead you to believe. As the Board realizes the number of variables involved, 1,800 overrides might not seem so big anymore. There is no easy way to tackle this issue, and I hope the School Board recognizes the size of the challenge ahead of them.
Jeff Yu
WW-PHS South Class of 2012
