The College Solutions Blog

February 13, 2014

The College Board released its latest annual AP report this week. You can also see the entire report here: 10th Annual AP Report to the Nation AP classes are a creature of the College Board so keep in mind that the organization will always spin the AP statistics in a positive way in its report. One of the great unresolved...

July 16, 2013

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from parents this month and I’ll share some of them with you in posts this summer. I’m starting with an email from a mom from North Carolina whose son has his heart set on the sort of schools that top students tend to dream about. If you have some suggestions for this teenager,...

January 25, 2011

Last month I wrote a blog post about the movie Race to Nowhere that’s being shown at high schools across the country. I pretty much trashed the movie – here is the post: Race to Nowhere Skeptic If you want to get an idea of why I’d like to hurl some overripe tomatoes at a screening of this movie, check...

August 19, 2010

Is there a downside to Advanced Placement classes? I’m asking this question because many teenagers and their parents seem to believe that you can’t get into a good college without taking a killer load of AP classes. Taking three or four (or more!) AP classes in a semester can suck all the fun out of high school, but many kids...

August 10, 2010

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...

September 10, 2009

My son is a senior at a high school that loathes Advanced Placement classes. The school administrators believe that AP classes provide students with knowledge that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Considering that AP classes demand a lot of memorization and must be taught at a breathless pace to get through the material, I’d have to agree. Students...

July 10, 2009

Want your high school student to be prepared for college? You can find some of the best training wheels at community colleges. For a high school student, taking a community college class is equivalent to enrolling in an Advanced Placement class. A friend of mine, who is a top dog at a community college district in Southern California, argues that...