AP Credit Will No Longer Be Accepted At Dartmouth

Maybe the AP system has degraded over the years. When I was in school it helped immensely and I was able to enter college as a mid-year sophomore and graduate early. And the level of material and rigor in AP courses seemed roughly comparable to 100 and 200 level college courses. The cynic in me sees this as a money making move, as it means that more incoming students will have to pay more to graduate.<p>I'm really curious whether Dartmouth performed any studies on the matter or if this is just a spontaneous decision based on anecdotal evidence.<p>P.S. Also, in my experience and observation taking 100 and 200 level classes in college is a pretty significant ripoff outside of perhaps the top 20 universities in the nation. Almost all of the time such courses tend to be taught by assistants and are heavily textbook based. For the vast majority of people pursuing a college education getting an AA at a community college and then transferring to a local state college is a far, far better option financially.

Some of the more cynical responses to this article ignore the fact that AP credits at Dartmouth were already strictly limited by departments on a case-by-case basis. I went in with 11 AP credits and was able to graduate at most a term early.<p>Here are some more concrete numbers on how this change affects early graduation:<p>- Students arrive with an average of three credits;<p>- Nonetheless 80% of students take 4 years;<p>- 20% of students will be required to enroll for an extra term.<p>The net result is $4 million in extra income. [1] As a point of reference, Dartmouth's endowment is over $3.4 billion.<p>I also want to point out that this discussion ignores reasons against AP at the high school level, which has caused some high schools to stop offering them.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.dartblog.com/data/2013/01/010556.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.dartblog.com/data/2013/01/010556.php</a>

College math instructor here; I've taught Calculus III for the past three years. I always feel bad for my freshman students, particularly those in the fall semester. Some of them are prepared, and some aren't, but almost none of them have a mature understanding of mathematics that we expect in a sophomore-level course.<p>The problem with AP from my observation (at least in math) is that it encourages teaching the test. I'm certain many of them have never seen \lim_{h-&#62;0}\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h} before, so how can they suddenly expect to understand the limit definition of a partial derivative either?<p>I took a Calculus course in high school, skipped on taking the AP test, and then took an honors section of Cal I when I got to college to get a deeper understanding (and an easy first-semester A). I feel I made the best decision.

Possibly worth throwing into the discussion: Caltech does not accept any AP credit. However, classes can be tested out of with Caltech's own tests (which were considerably more difficult than AP tests in my opinion). Testing out of these classes removes these classes from graduation requirements.<p>Is it possible Dartmouth is just trying to raise their academic standards rather than milk students for more money?

If AP classes don't give credit, I wonder if this will lead some students to graduate high school after three years.

Accompanying headline: My Kid With AP Credits Will No Longer Be Applying to Dartmouth

AP credits have never been a particularly great ROI. My wife went the different route of signing up for classes at the local community college. You get a lot more out of them (in the rush to keep up with the joneses, high school administrators are calling everything "AP" these days), and also colleges are quite willing to accept those credits for lower-level classes.

As a current student at an Ivy League school, it's interesting to see that this is getting much backlash now. My school hasn't accepted AP credit for a while now, and it's never been a problem. Students grouse superficially, but for the most part, it's understood that they're just prerequisities to get in to the schools you want to go to.

The relevant pages on the Dartmouth College website<p><a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/credit_and_placement.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/credit_...</a><p><a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/admissions/apply/thinking/credit.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dartmouth.edu/admissions/apply/thinking/credit.ht...</a><p><a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/advanced_placement_2016.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.dartmouth.edu/~upperde/firstyear-students/advance...</a><p>don't appear to be updated to match what is reported in the AP article.<p>What's really news here is that Dartmouth ever granted credit for AP courses--that is unusual in the Ivy League, of which Dartmouth is one of eight members. On the other hand, there are hundreds upon hundreds of other colleges all around the country that continue to offer AP credit for AP scores on specified tests of a specified level, so each high school student who decides whether or not to take an AP test is deciding to do so based on what colleges the student is considering attending. This is no big deal. Each college decides its own policy. The policy of Harvard<p><a href="http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&#38;pageid=icb.page388448" rel="nofollow">http://apo.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k73580&#38;pag...</a><p><a href="http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/transfer/transfer_credit.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/apply/transfer/tra...</a><p>will continue to be different from the policy of (for example) Rutgers,<p><a href="http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/academic-credit" rel="nofollow">http://soe.rutgers.edu/oaa/academic-credit</a><p><a href="http://sebs.rutgers.edu/new/aptests.asp" rel="nofollow">http://sebs.rutgers.edu/new/aptests.asp</a><p><a href="http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/advanced-placement" rel="nofollow">http://sasundergrad.rutgers.edu/academics/academic-credit/ad...</a><p>and students will continue to compare the varied college policies on AP credit<p><a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_get.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/exgrd_get.htm...</a><p><a href="http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.jsp" rel="nofollow">http://collegesearch.collegeboard.com/apcreditpolicy/index.j...</a><p>among a lot of other trade-offs the students consider when deciding where to attend college, including whether or not they are admitted to the college in the first place.

I know that the AP system is under-fire, but this just screams money grab technique to me...

I don't get it. You can't make things harder than they are by their nature; sure, you can make interestingly problems, but in a discipline is a discipline. For example, general calculus hasn't changed that much in decades. The same stuff I learned in AP calc senior year of highschool, people learned freshman year of college. The only thing was, in highschool the exam questions were actual problems and not proofs of Stokes theorem or some other wildly pure math question.

It always felt like you were robbing yourself of really interesting college courses if you skipped them due to AP.<p>I always saw AP as more of a gateway to college due to the prestige/GPA-boost they gave your application, rather than a real way of getting significant college credit.

The AP gradations are useless. If I remember right the calculus exam has about 120 possible points and you only need about a 56 to score a 5.