The New York Times        Friday, February 15, 2002                    NATIONAL  

Study Faults Advanced-Placement Courses

By Karen W. Arenson

            A newly released study of advanced placement mathematics and science courses, which have become an important ingredient for admission to elite colleges, is highly critical of the curriculums that most of those courses cover and the way they are taught.

            Each year, hundreds of thousands of high school students take either the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses or the International Baccalaureate program, offered by an organization of that name, in order to receive college credits, skip introductory courses in college or impress admissions officials.  Selective colleges use students’ enrollment in these programs as an indicator of whether applicants have taken the most challenging courses available to them.

            But the two-year study, commissioned by the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Education, said that the courses crammed in too much material at the expense of understanding and that many were taught by teachers who did not have even bachelor’s degrees in the given field. 

            The report also said that courses in biology and chemistry had generally failed to keep pace with developments in their disciplines.  And it noted that many students were poorly prepared before they started the courses, some having skipped intermediate preparatory courses so that they could squeeze advanced-placement onto their high school transcripts.

            Yet the report recommended that advanced courses be made more accessible to minority students and to youths in rural and poor urban areas. Despite their shortcomings, it said, the courses do challenge the students who take them.

            The study, issued yesterday, was conducted by a 19-member committee convened by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academies of Science and Engineering.  It examined only advanced-placement programs in math and science, not those in other disciplines like English and history.

            “We think that the present condition of advanced study is not satisfactory; it is problematic,” said Jerry P. Gollub, a physics professor at Haverford College who was a co-chairman of the study group.

            “The Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs have contributed a great deal to the quality of science education in American high schools,” Dr. Gollub said, “but many urgent improvements are needed.”

            Dr. Gollub said the College Board and the International Baccalaureate Organization were not entirely at fault.  Referring to the expanded interest in their programs, he said, “They’ve gotten caught up by the success of a system that is being driven by a funny motivation: student efforts to get into college,” rather than knowledge for its own sake.

            A call to the director of the International Baccalaureate program was not returned.  But officials at the College Board said they agreed with some criticisms in the report and had been trying to address them.

            “In many respects, the report is on target,” said Chiara Coletti, the College Board’s vice president for communications, who said she had seen only a summary of the study.

            Ms. Coletti said the College Board revised its Advanced Placement calculus about a decade ago, giving it more depth and less breadth, and wanted to do the same with its biology, chemistry and physics courses, as the study group recommended.  She also said the board was addressing another recommendation: to expand access to Advanced Placement courses.

            But, she said, the board is less ready to embrace the report’s recommendation that it become more involved in verifying the quality of advanced-placement classes, since it prefers to leave individual teachers with latitude in how classes are taught.  (The teachers are those from the students’ own schools; the College Board provides only the curriculum and, if the student wants, a year-end test.)

            The National Science Foundation and the Education Department asked for the report after American students’ poor showing in advanced mathematics and science on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, in 1998.  (The report noted, however, that further analysis of the international test results showed that some of the American students included in that test had not taken advanced courses, and that the students who had taken the College Board’s Advanced Placement calculus and physics performed better than students in other countries.)

            Dr. Gollub was one of two co-chairmen of the study group; the other was Philip C. Curtis Jr., emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles.  The group included science and math professors, high school teachers and educational psychologists.  Four sub-panels looked at the disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics.  The report is available at www.nationalacademies.org.