Spring Break
AP tests no match for Greeks, Rick Astley
by Chongsheng Chen
Op-Ed | 10/7/08
Posted online at 3:28 AM EST on 10/7/08
If you were one of the roughly 30,000 (31,997 according to the Facebook group "Everybody write 'THIS IS SPARTA!' on your AP and school essays") who wrote "This is Sparta!" on the 2008 AP exams in a free-response question or essay, consider how seriously you took your AP exams.
Were you really that serious about getting a 5 or college credit?
If you were completely clueless about the questions you were given and simply put down "This is Sparta!" or invoked some other fad, such as the Rickroll (look it up), chances are you probably didn't really take the course seriously, unless you were one of those who actually studied but still were unable to come up with an answer and so decided to join craze.
You were probably one of the many students who chose to take APs to prove to your dream colleges that you were capable of studying "college-level work," as the College Board suggests AP courses are equivalent to. You probably wanted to show off how good you were to your favorite school, whether that favorite school of yours was Brandeis, Boston University or even Harvard. You probably wanted that precious extra weight to your GPA that could bring it to a maximum of 4.5 or 5.0.
AP courses, however, sometimes do not perfectly sync with college-level courses. Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews interviewed a parent whose child who took AP European History in sophomore year, who said the teacher "had little knowledge of European history and little training prior to the class." Even worse, much of the class was focused on test-taking skills rather than actual European history. "They were primarily taking review tests from the College Board Web site," the parent said. The parent believed this problem to be due to the increasing teacher shortage, which leaves few AP-qualified teachers to teach an increasing number of AP courses.
Indeed, a teacher shortage does cause a drop in overall numbers of AP-qualified teachers who can teach high-quality AP courses that equate to college-level work. Perhaps this is one reason for putting in such pointless responses such as "Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down."
Were you really that serious about getting a 5 or college credit?
If you were completely clueless about the questions you were given and simply put down "This is Sparta!" or invoked some other fad, such as the Rickroll (look it up), chances are you probably didn't really take the course seriously, unless you were one of those who actually studied but still were unable to come up with an answer and so decided to join craze.
You were probably one of the many students who chose to take APs to prove to your dream colleges that you were capable of studying "college-level work," as the College Board suggests AP courses are equivalent to. You probably wanted to show off how good you were to your favorite school, whether that favorite school of yours was Brandeis, Boston University or even Harvard. You probably wanted that precious extra weight to your GPA that could bring it to a maximum of 4.5 or 5.0.
AP courses, however, sometimes do not perfectly sync with college-level courses. Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews interviewed a parent whose child who took AP European History in sophomore year, who said the teacher "had little knowledge of European history and little training prior to the class." Even worse, much of the class was focused on test-taking skills rather than actual European history. "They were primarily taking review tests from the College Board Web site," the parent said. The parent believed this problem to be due to the increasing teacher shortage, which leaves few AP-qualified teachers to teach an increasing number of AP courses.
Indeed, a teacher shortage does cause a drop in overall numbers of AP-qualified teachers who can teach high-quality AP courses that equate to college-level work. Perhaps this is one reason for putting in such pointless responses such as "Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down."
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