The Advanced Placement Program (AP) is big business for College Board and its contracting partner, Education Testing Service (ETS). The College Board contracts with ETS to help develop and administer the AP exams, so I think it is fair to treat them as one entity that, in this article, I'll call the College Board. Last year, College Board administered 1.8 million exams. It costs a student $82 to take an AP Exam. If you are doing the numbers with me, that's $147.6 million in income for College Board.

According to the College Board:

• Nearly 15,000 schools participate in the AP Program. This represents 60% of U.S. high schools.
• Last year, 1.1 million kids took AP exams.
• More then 60,000 teachers attend AP workshops and institutes for professional development.

College Board has a big investment in AP, and there is a lot of "sounds too good to be true" information coming from College Board about the influence of AP on students and their eventual success in college. You can download a PDF from College Board that contains pretty glowing "facts" (see AP Fact Sheet). However, there are some significant problems with AP classes and the quality of those classes.

Back in January, the Washington Post ran an article about the lack on any relationship between student involvement with AP courses and college performance. This information was drawn from a study done at UC Berkley by researchers Saul Geiser and Veronica Santelices. The study, titled "The Role of Advanced Placement and Honors Courses in College Admissions," offers some sobering conclusions about the impact of AP courses on college bound students.

Taking AP Classes May Not Improve College Performance

The big shocker from this study (based on a sample of 81,445 students) was that there is no relationship between college performance and completion of AP courses. According to the researchers, "the number of AP/honors courses that students take in high school bears almost no relationship to their college grades."

AP Exams Do Predict College Performance

I suppose the next question you might ask is, "Is there a relationship between performance on the AP exam and performance in college?" The answer seems to be, yes. There is research to suggest that performance on the AP exams may be a good indicator of student performance in college. ETS has issued two unpublished studies that support this conclusion: "Advanced Placement Students in College: An Investigation of Course Grades at 21 Colleges" and "AP Students in College: An Investigation of Their Course-taking Patterns and College Majors."

AP Classes May Not Prepare Students for AP Exams

The conclusion you would have to draw from all of this is that AP courses do little to prepare students for AP exams or college.

So how did we get into this mess? CNN recently reported that high schools are faced with increasing pressures from communities, parents, and even students to offer more rigorous college preparation courses. Might schools, faced such pressures, have resorted to slapping the "AP" label in front of just about any course that seemed remotely related to college preparation? Why not? Until the Geiser study, no one was asking whether these courses actually prepared kids for the AP exams or college.

My friend, Todd Kettler, an advanced academics administrator in Coppell ISD near Dallas, TX, commented to me this morning, "This stuff has gotten goofy. I've seen schools in other districts offering AP photography classes. There isn't even an AP photography exam!"

Even students realize that these courses do little to prepare them for the AP exam. Increasingly, it is clear that the majority of students are not taking AP classes to prepare for AP exams or college. They are taking the classes for the "bonus" points such classes add to their GPA (AP classes often weigh more heavily when calculating GPA). In fact, according to the The Detroit News only about 40% of students taking AP classes eventually take the AP exams. Essentially, 60% of students taking AP classes are doing so to inflate their GPA and their chances of being accepted to college.

The College Board Will Begin Certifying AP Classes Beginning in 2007

Even College Board recognizes that there is a serious problem with AP class quality. This year, College Board has announced that it will begin auditing AP course offerings beginning in 2007. Only students who complete a College Board certified AP class will be able to have the "AP" designation (and weighted grade) next to a class title on their transcript. To determine if a class qualifies for the AP designation, the College Board will audit a prospective class' curriculum, sample assignments, and sample examinations. Later, it is expected that the level of a teacher's training in AP will influence the audit results.

While I believe College Board should have become involved in certifying AP class much sooner, the organization's efforts to ensure that AP classes align with and prepare students for the AP exam and college success ought to be supported.