Are AP Classes Worth It?

Are AP classes really worthwhile?

There is no doubt that advanced placement classes are popular.  Last year, nearly 1.7 million students worldwide took more than 2.9 million AP exams. Twenty five percent of high school graduates have taken at least one AP exam.

With teenagers returning to the classroom grind soon, I thought this would be a good time to share the experience of a wealthy suburban school that questioned the wisdom of Advanced Placement courses that ambitious teenagers feel compelled to take. A story in The New York Times explored the decision of a wealthy suburban high school to phase out AP classes.

An AP Dropout

A year after Scarsdale (NY) High School decided to begin shutting down its AP courses, the bright students were still getting into the nation’s top colleges and universities. Imagine that!

The knock against AP classes is that they promote learning that is an inch deep and a mile wide. Teachers can’t slow down to linger on any worthwhile topic — whether it’s the essays of Virginia Woolf or string theory in physics — because there are too many facts to cram down the kids’ throats.

A student at the University of Chicago’s University High School wrote an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times complaining about the pace of AP courses and their superficiality:

The problem with the AP program is that we don’t have time to really learn U.S. history because we’re preparing for the exam. We race through the textbook, cramming in the facts, a day on the Great Awakening, a week on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a week on World War II, a week on the era from FDR to JFK, a day on the civil rights movement  — with nothing on transcendentalism, or the Harlem Renaissance, or Albert Einstein.

There is no time to write a paper. Bound by the exam, my history teacher wistfully says we have to be ready in early May.

Sometimes I feel as if the College Board, which administers the AP program, is haunting our history class — a long, gray, flat board with a clock on it looming over us. Like an oracle, it tells us what is worth learning and how long learning should take.

What the AP tests do quite well is help with the College Board’s bottom line. The College Board generates about a third of its revenue charging for the AP tests.

With any luck, more schools will follow Scarsdale’s lead.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for and CBSMoneyWatchUS News & World Report.


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  1. I suggest looking at Don’t Stay In School by boyinaband on YouTube.

    Despite the title (yes, admittedly used as click bait and to be “controversial”) it brings up many great points about today’s education, though not necessarily just about AP classes. He also has a video where he expands upon why he wrote it and such (I believe it’s )

    I completely agree with his views, which if you don’t want to watch the video are basically this:

    They teach too many useless things in school.

    I’m 16 and a junior in High School (In the US, if it matters) and I can honestly say more often than not I feel my time is being wasted. I’m in a great school with excellent programs, but all in all it just feels pointless.

    Like for example, these ideal student molds we are expected to conform to in order to do well in not just school but life in general. I am expected (based on the education level of my parents, my income, where I live, and all that stuff) to be an above average (we’re looking B+/A) student with plenty of extra curriculars and going to college. I should be Acing all my honors courses, certainly my CP (“college prep” but it’s lower than honors, so it’s basically the lowest level a normal student who doesn’t need extra help can take) and do fairly well on my AP’s. Now let’s look at the truth.

    I have taken at least the beginning course in all of the Arts offered at my school, and I’m very creative. I’m part of the marching band and thus have no time for basically anything else. I am terrible at math and all right at history, but english is where I excel (probably because I write in what little free time I have).

    Now, back to the ideal thing. If a student is bad at say, Art, they are told they simply don’t have the amptitude for it and move on to better things. Clearly they are just more of a right brained or logical person. Simple. But look at someone more like me. I can write, sing, read music, play instrumets, draw, design, create, and all these wonderful artistic things. I absolute am terrible at math though, at least beyond the basics (like, I fail to understand slope and all these things, but the basic formulas behind things or the math you do in science I get perfectly). Now, I’m more of a left brained, creative person, so I just don’t have the aptitude for math, right?

    No. Clearly I’m just not trying hard enough or simply stupid, right? That’s how one is treated in the Common Core system anyways. This is how I think schooling should be set up:

    Primary or Elementary School should be left pretty much as is, maybe upping it slightly more to teach more sixth grade stuff at that level, the very basics anyways. Middle school should be spent finalizing the very basics and figuring out wht general or specific career you want to go into. Me for example, I would say I want to do something with entertainment and/or the arts. Then we get to High School, where there are two different paths for the first two years; those who know exactly where they want to go (Teacher, Chef, Engineer, ect) and those who don’t (Some type of scientist, something to do with art, ect). By the end of the first two years, a student should have tried out things in their field to make sure it’s what they want to do, and settled on a final destination. The last two years are spent preparing you for the main point of college, not pointlessly difficult classes, but your major/what job you want to go into.

    Of course, they should also teach things in middle and high school everyone needs to know, like how taxes and money (banks, checks, ect) work. How to go about getting a job. All these things literally everyone will do all the time. Not rote memorization of all the presidents there every were, slope and quadratic formulas, the periodic table, and being able to quote shakespeare at a moments notice.

    And I know some people will want to say “But that’s what parents are for, to teach this sort of stuff.” What about orphans? Or those kids with parents who are always away (for work or other reasons)? Kids whose parents themselves maybe weren’t educated, not very well or at all. The public school system is severely outdated. It was created when children were still needed to tend to farms. They were created to allow everyone to do basic maths and be literate, but most children can do that before they even enter schools now. Our way of living has changed drastically and so should the way we learn. It’s like we have made so much progressive and discovery about how people and the mind works, and none of it shows.

    For example, teenagers internal clocks are usually sent askew during teen years, often making them work better later and not be able to properly function in the sense of memory and all until about ten am (based off of an actual study of the human mind). This puts my first class to absolute waste. Also, the typical attntion span of a person, teen or not, is about twenty minutes. So 90 minute classes are kind of pointless if I’m only able to physcially pay attention for about half of it. And though I won’t delve into it because it’s a whole ordeal itself, the fact that anxiety, stress levels, and depression have all increased drastically in the current generation (coming from someone with anxiety and depression, on top of being a perfectionist so I am constantly stressing myself out) especially in teens aka students should say something about the current system.

    I’m terribly sorry this got really rambly, but I hope I made my point. The bottom line is, things really need to change.

  2. AP courses will become the dinosaurs of education. The paradigm is changing. Many students in more progressive school districts are now using Concurrent Enrollment or Dual Enrollment. This is where a high school student enrolls in college courses while still in high school. Most districts pay for the tuition and books for the students. It has been demonstrated that by the time a student graduates from high school they will have also completed their freshman year of college with 30 plus college credits in hand. If recieving college credit is the main idea here? Then why bother with an AP classes, and take the test which you have to pay for also. Then who knows? The college you want to attend may not accept AP coursework. In my opinion every high school in the nation should be offering this option to deserving academically motivated students.

  3. For most public schools, on-level and honors courses are an absolute joke, and are designed to be ridiculously easy so anyone can get a B.

    1. I’d have to agree that at some schools, the rigor of AP classes is a joke. I think kids are primarily interested in taking these classes because they can “earn” an inflated GPA, which will impress colleges. The big winner is the College Board that charges students to take the AP tests in the spring.

      Lynn O’Shaughnessy

  4. I like the fact that there are known standards for these classes. Teachers “trying to cram facts” into kids’ heads is a good thing. Things like string theory, while interesting, are not the most important thing for students to learn in an introductory level college physics course. AP test scores are one of the few objective measures of content taught in school. Maybe too many students who are not prepared for these classes are taking them, and they should be counseled to take other courses. For those students who are prepared, the beauty of the test is that these courses can’t be surreptitiously dumbed down. Also, a school that is serious about its AP program will work to make sure that its “pre-AP” courses do a good job preparing students for AP level work.

  5. I’ve written a (very lengthy) response to your post on my own blog, but to summarize here:
    If it weren’t for AP classes, I wouldn’t be starting university with 32 credits. It’s only a matter of researching beforehand which college you want to attend and which AP credit they accept. I’ve achieved 5’s on all my tests, mainly due to my excellent teachers–and an AP teacher that never delves deeply into the topics taught shouldn’t be teaching AP classes, in my humble opinion. While the class pace is fast, all the AP classes I took explored topics much more deeply than their regular counterparts.

  6. Too often we can breeze through life, even look intelligent, knowing a little about a lot. It’s too bad because we miss out on things that make a differance. To make a diferance we must have the kind of input that inspires and this must come from depth and variety not just vague variety.
    It is easy to come to the conclusion these classes, AP, aren’t adding to our youth what they need to do well in college. Also that more time in deeper study will benefit our youth both further and farther in life.

  7. Many state universities give actual credit for having taken an intro-level class if a certain score is achieved on the AP exam. If one is good at taking tests, it may be deemed worth spending $85 (or whatever it’s up to now) to avoid spending $900 and a semester of precious college schedule time later on a class that is required but not of interest. But it is darned difficult to get a credit-worthy AP score in any class except junior-level AP English composition.