Sam R. Hall: More students arriving to college unprepared. What has changed with high school curricula?
Feb. 6—A recent column warning schools not to sacrifice advanced courses in the pursuit of dual credit offerings generated quite a lot of feedback and discussion.
One educator from Virginia reached out over concerns that the growing emphasis on dual credit courses is leading to a growing number of students who enter college unprepared.
She shared that College Board — the organization behind the SAT and Advanced Placement courses — released a study saying that "almost 50% of the students who are arriving at their doorsteps are not prepared for college-level courses."
"These students are taking remedial coursework before ever beginning their core college classes. These same students who attend college were A and B high school students who should have been highly qualified to continue their education at the college level," she wrote.
Her question: Is there any data that suggest that the unprepared students tend to have taken the dual credit route? "Until we have data that supports this, we have no data other than students aren't taking AP exams."
It's an interesting question. I maintain that the data we do have suggest not that schools are pushing students away from Advanced Placement and toward dual credit but are instead sacrificing the benefits of AP courses by unsuccessfully combining them with dual credit.
As I pointed out in a previous column, "participation in AP courses has continued to grow across the country and in Mississippi." At the same time, however, "the number of tests being taken has started to slow. ... And in 2018, we saw the first year-over-year decline in AP tests being taken in nearly 10 years."
I would offer that one reason for this dichotomy is the trend of combining AP and dual credit courses. There are occasions where this is done successfully, but many times it is not.
One reason is that the curricula for the combined AP and dual credit classes don't align. For instance, the AP Language and Composition curriculum focuses on "understanding of writing and rhetorical arguments through reading, analyzing, and writing texts," versus dual credit English Comp that often follows a community college curriculum focused on teaching the basic five-paragraph research paper. In other words, AP is a far more rigorous, higher-level course.
So when you combine these classes, it can be extremely taxing for a teacher to essentially create two lesson plans for one class and for students to switch between the two. Then there is the need to have teachers who are trained and certified to teach both.
But combining the classes let schools count more students as taking both dual credit and AP courses, so the trend continues. And the results? In Mississippi, it would appear that less students are taking the AP test because, one must theorize, they are not prepared to do so or pushed in that direction due to the focus being more on dual credit while schools can still say, "Hey, look at all the AP students we have."
It is the rigor of an AP class that provides the benefits for college-bound students. Innumerable studies show benefits for students who score 2 or higher on multiple AP tests or 3 or higher on at least one AP test. But they are making those scores because of the rigor of the course.
To be clear, dual credit courses are beneficial, and often beneficial to a wider audience. For smaller schools, if you have to choose just one, you choose dual credit, obviously.
But where possible, if you value higher academic achievement alongside broader college readiness, then equitable emphasis must be applied to Advanced Placement and dual credit courses. Otherwise, we are sacrificing the benefits to the brightest minds Mississippi is producing.
SAM R. HALL is executive editor of the Daily Journal. Contact him at sam.hall@djournal.com or follow @samrhall on Twitter.
