December 29, 1994|By New York Times News Service
Since their introduction 41 years ago, Advanced Placement tests have become a fixture in high schools across Maryland and the nation for bright, college-bound students. While they attend high school, students earn college credit by taking demanding classes ranging from art and Latin to calculus and physics.
But as the number of Advanced Placement courses -- and students taking them -- has proliferated, more and more colleges and universities are tightening the number of credits they will award to students.
Some institutions have increased the minimum test score they will accept. Others are refusing to accept the credits at all as substitutes for college work, saying that as they have redesigned curriculums, the tests have become outdated.
All of this puts students like Adriana Izquierda, a freshman at Johns Hopkins University, in an unexpected spot. During her senior year in Buffalo, N.Y., Ms. Izquierda, 19, thought she had taken enough Advanced Placement courses to skip her freshman year of college and save the money. The tests cost about $72 each, or about $22 a credit, far cheaper than the actual cost of a typical college-level course.
Harvard University, which accepted her, agreed to give her credit for all her advanced placement classes, offering her 52 undergraduate credits in American history, French, German, English composition, economics, calculus and biology, and placing her in the sophomore class.
Instead, Ms. Izquierda decided to go to Johns Hopkins because, as a pre-med student, she felt it had a stronger science curriculum and more research opportunities. But Hopkins, like a small but growing number of private, competitive colleges, was unwilling to give her credit for all the courses.
After she enrolled she learned that the college would give her only 22 credits, leaving her 2 short of the minimum 24 credits Hopkins requires of sophomore students. That meant she started as a second semester freshman. "I was surprised and startled," she said, "that they didn't accept more."
Ms. Izquierda, a double major in biology and history, plans to appeal to the economics department to accept two additional courses for six college credits before attempting to get other departments to accept her other advanced placement work.
The changing attitudes of some institutions toward the advanced placement tests come as more students are taking the tests -- a record of nearly 400,000 in 1994. In Maryland, more than 10,000 students in public and private high schools took AP exams in 1994, with most scoring high enough on a scale of 1 to 5 to qualify for college credit.
Colleges have encouraged more students to take the tests by taking them into consideration for admission and for merit-based scholarships. And state education departments also are eager for students to take the courses and exams because of the critical thinking skills built into the instruction of advanced placement courses, not the rote learning that still often occurs in more traditional high school courses.
But, said Kathy Christie, an analyst with the Education Commission of the States, a Denver education research and policy organization, "If it looks like the advanced placement tests are not matching the curriculum that universities are offering or if it looks like too many students are learning by rote, then these are two good reasons for demanding higher scores or not taking the scores at all."
She does not think the financial windfall that institutions receive by having students repeat courses they took in high school is a factor. Students like Ms. Izquierda are rare, and the total population of students with advanced placement credit
represents a fraction of many institutions' enrollment.
Some institutions, such as Amherst College in Massachusetts, have never accepted the credits. This fall, a faculty committee at the private, four-year liberal arts college voted yet again to make freshmen take the college's full course load.
"I have raised the question of why this college has this policy," said Jane Reynolds, who has been Amherst's dean of admissions for six years. "I said, 'Look, we are using it as an evaluation tool. Why aren't we giving credit for these courses like our competitors?' From a consumer standpoint, I wanted to know why."
The faculty committee's response: It feels comfortable giving credit for only the work the college administers.
"I have been around the argument enough that I agree with them," said Ms. Reynolds, who added students and families generally accept the college's position when it is explained.
Few college administrators and professors question the rigor of the advanced placement tests, which were written for the College Board by the Educational Testing Service, the Princeton, N.J., testing and education research company that also administers the Scholastic Assessment Test, the Graduate Record Examination and other college admissions tests.
