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Advanced Placement

The Advanced Placement (AP) program is a cooperative endeavor between secondary schools and colleges that allows high school students to complete college-level courses during high school. Historically, one of the more common responses to serving exceptionally bright students was to place them in the next grade, accelerating their learning, often leading to earlier completion of college-level work. The AP program falls into this broader spectrum of acceleration strategies. Acceleration of content or services encompasses two perspectives. The completion perspective focuses on maximizing return on one's educational investment by minimizing the time required to complete an educational objective. The enrichment perspective focuses not on time but rather on the increase in challenge that is inherent in attempting more advanced work. The AP program includes both the completion and the challenge perspectives, depending on the goals of the student taking the course.

History

The AP program arose in the 1950s out of the belief that secondary schools and colleges should work together to allow motivated students to complete work at their level and advance as quickly as possible. In 1951, the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education sponsored studies of the transition from secondary to postsecondary education that indicated students should be allowed to advance as quickly as possible to avoid repetition of course work in high school and college. At the same time, educators from several college preparatory high schools and colleges began work on how best to use the last years of high school and first years of college. From this work a pilot program of high school courses and assessments was developed, offering 11 subjects that could be taken by high school juniors and seniors and accepted as replacements for introductory college courses.

By the mid-1950s, the pilot program involved 27 schools and had demonstrated successful results on the first examinations. At this point, the College Board took over administration of the program, which was named the College Board's Advanced Placement Program. During the 1960s the first teacher training workshops were offered by the College Board, and during the 1990s the College Board introduced Pre-AP programs to help students gain the necessary learning skills to be successful in AP courses. Course offerings have expanded over time, growing to 37 courses in 22 subject areas as of 2007.

Program Structure and Design

The AP program courses span the range from fine arts to science and include such courses as Art History, Physics, English Literature and Composition, Environmental Science, Japanese Language and Culture, and Music Theory. All except the Studio Art test consist of two sections, a multiple choice and a structured answer section that varies in design according to the subject (written, oral, or computation, as appropriate). The tests are administered in May and are paper based, but increasingly more Internet-based tests are being offered. There is a fee for each exam; as of 2008 the cost was $84 per test. Fee reductions are available for students with financial needs. Services are available for students with documented disabilities. The assessment results are reported on a 5-point scale with 5 indicating the student is extremely well qualified to be placed in the next level of the course sequence, down to 1, indicating that no recommendation is given regarding the student's placement.

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