[lg policy] Hispanic students make strides on AP exams, College Board reports

Mon Feb 14 16:29:45 UTC 2011

The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
Hispanic students make strides on AP exams, College Board reports

The number of Hispanic students taking AP exams has increased
dramatically, the College Board says. Hispanic students are a bigger
percentage of those passing the exams than ever before.

By Ilana Kowarski, Contributor
posted February 11, 2011 at 4:24 pm EST

Hispanic high school students in the US now make up a greater share of
those achieving a passing score on an Advanced Placement (AP) exam
than at any other point in the past decade, according to a report
released Wednesday by the national College Board.

According to the College Board's annual report, the "AP Report to the
Nation," 14.6 percent of US high school seniors who passed an AP exam
in 2010 were Hispanic, an increase of 2.6 percent since 2001. The rise
follows an effort by the College Board to recruit more minority
students to take the demanding tests.

AP exams measure college-level competency in a wide range of subjects,
from English and calculus to Spanish and US history, which test takers
have usually studied in AP courses taught according to a standardized
curriculum. The exams are graded on a 5-point scale and may confer
college credit if a student passes with a score of 3 or higher.

Top 10 benefits of a college degree

The increased representation among successful AP test takers by
Hispanic students coincides with an even larger increase in their
representation in the nation's high school population. There were 5.2
percent more Hispanic students in the graduating high school class of
2010 than in the class of 2001, according to the College Board.

While the overall number of AP test takers has nearly doubled since
2001, the College Board says, the number of Hispanic AP test takers
has nearly tripled, increasing from 48,354 in 2001 to 136,717 in 2010.
The number of passing Hispanic test takers grew from 33,479 to 74,479
over that period.

The news that more Hispanic students are taking and passing the AP
exam comes at a time when 41 percent of the Hispanic population in the
US above the age of 20 does not have a regular high school diploma,
according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
'More work needs to be done'

The overall percentage of American high school students who passed an
AP test increased modestly between 2009 and 2010, rising from 16 to
16.9 percent.

Despite their progress, Hispanic students were still somewhat
underrepresented among those who passed an AP test last year. While
Hispanic students were 14.6 percent of those who passed an AP test,
they made up 16 percent of AP test takers overall and 16.8 percent of
the graduating high school class of 2010. Some 54.5 percent of all
Hispanic test takers passed at least one AP test, compared with 59.6
percent of all students and 61.8 percent of white students.

That’s why Sue Landers, executive director of the AP program for the
College Board, says more work needs to be done to improve minority
test performance. “We would really like to see the diversity of our
country reflected in our AP classrooms and in the demographics of
students who succeed on the AP test,” she says in an interview.

For that reason, Ms. Landers explains, the AP program has made a
“concerted effort” to recruit test takers from minority groups. Since
2001, the number of African-American AP test takers more than tripled,
increasing from 23,906 to 73,270. Yet African-Americans remain
underrepresented among AP test takers. While African-American students
made up 14.6 percent of the 2010 senior class, they made up only 8.6
percent of AP test takers and a mere 2.3 percent of those who passed
an AP exam that year.
Questions about recruitment

The move to increase access to the AP exam has not been without
criticism. Robert Schaeffer, public-education director of the National
Center for Fair and Open Testing, says he has reservations about the
recruitment campaign.

"It's questionable whether there's real educational value in getting
everybody to take the AP exam even if they are not academically
prepared," he says in an interview. "It's not clear that this benefits
anyone except for the College Board."

However, AP calculus teacher Dixie Ross disagrees. Her school in
Pflugerville, Texas, is very diverse, with a third of students
identifying themselves as Hispanic and a quarter as African-American,
she says. Her classes were once filled almost exclusively with white
students but now include more minorities, a change she welcomes. The
increased number of minority AP test takers is a sign of progress, Ms.
Ross says in an interview.

“Historically, we’ve had huge wells of untapped talent, because we
didn’t let people develop themselves if they looked different,” she
says. “That’s been our country’s loss. We need to educate people from
all walks of life.”
Students say AP helps

Ross says her students have told her that their AP experiences helped
them succeed in college, and she says this was even true of some
students who did not pass the exam.

Many academics have argued that those who perform well on AP tests are
better prepared for higher education than those who do not, including
researchers at the National Center for Educational Accountability and
the College Board. Studies from both groups have shown a direct
correlation between AP test performance and college graduation rates.

But Mr. Schaeffer argues that expanding the number of AP test takers
has "diluted the pool" and produced high failure rates, particularly
in math and science. According to the College Board's own report, the
percentage of AP test takers who passed a single exam has dipped since
2001, from 64.3 percent to 59.6 percent. The report also acknowledges
that more than 50 percent of biology AP test takers fail the exam.

"The increase in AP test takers is not the tremendous leap forward
that people who sell the AP exam say it is," he said. "The AP is being
pushed as yet another magic bullet solution to the problems in
education, but is it really helpful for kids who are extremely
unlikely to succeed" on the test?

http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/print/content/view/print/362741
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