Taking AP Classes

Mr. Ahmed, my high school physics teacher, and one of my favourite teachers of all time tagged 100 former students in a Facebook Post with the following question:

I am sad to see students in high school focusing on the mark (percentage) rather than the quality of learning. A good number of students, for the sake of higher mark, are choosing not to challenge themselves by taking AP courses. Unfortunately, universities seems to encourage this.

Do you think taking AP courses worth it?

TLDR: marks matter. Taking AP courses shouldn’t (and usually doesn’t) lower average grades. This is why students should take AP classes. However, if teachers want a student to focus on learning, then give them a reason to not focus on marks.

Context

I went to Westwood Community High School in Northern Alberta, Canada. This school had a small population, and therefore very real connections between the teachers and students. It was also an academically focused school with their prized possession being its STEM program.

I went on to do Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo, which is regarded as a challenging/competitive program. I am in my second year of classes.

In many ways, this is a very niche sector. My classmates and I resided in a diverse and relatively wealthy community (because of our good old friend oil), and were all quite ambitious in general. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the statistics, but I am willing to bet that Westwood classes consistently score higher on standardized tests than average.

Regardless, my thoughts will be pruned overtime, and that is no reason to conceal them to the world right now!

Marks matter most

In an ideal education system, the quality of learning (including breadth and depth) would be the north star metric focused on for students and teachers alike. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The majority of people considering higher order classes like advanced placement will choose to go to university. And until we have a better way of testing domain intelligence of a student (see digitalsocrates.xyz), universities, especially in Canada, will continue to accept students primarily based on marks. Consequently, many ambitious students spend their 11th and 12th year of high school optimizing for the highest marks. This can take many forms, and is especially common amongst higher performing students:

• taking easier classes
• memorizing patterns instead of thinking critically
• changing public perspective to align more with that of your teacher (essentially sucking up)
• “begging” for marks

It is perfectly rational to trade 2 years of lesser quality high school education for 4 years of higher quality university education and possible downstream benefits including status, wealth, or other humane desires.

There is any easy way to fix as for a teacher: teach in depth and mark easily. I can think of some who already do this. I will leave it up to the teachers to decide if contributing to geographic grade inflation is worth it. In my opinion, it is. Another argument is that “going easy” isn’t fair to the students because it is misrepresentative of the real world. In this case I would strongly question why the teacher thinks it is in the students best interest to be the primary bottleneck in their life.

Take AP Classes!

Note

Advanced Placement classes work differently in US and Canada. AP is standardized within the US and recognized as a separate official curriculum by colleges there. In Canada, it is seen more as an “add-on” to already existing curriculum. More specifics below.

Taking AP classes is a no-brainer. Here is a list of pros and cons of AP classes:

Pros

• usually better teacher
• closer relationship with teacher
• more in depth content
• ambitious/likeminded classmates
• cohort based classes
• may look appealing to universities
• universities may accept for college credit (nobody should do this though)

Cons

• challenging content
• will take more time to learn
• AP exams can be expensive
• marks may be lower

Addressing the cons In depth education will always be more challenging, and thus more time consuming. Luckily in Canada, we treat the AP curriculum as an add-on to the regular curriculum. This means that course content is already split, and a student can decide whether or not indulge in the extra content. If the student isn’t interested, who cares?

A corollary “add-on” nature of Canadian AP classes is that Universities don’t usually care about the AP mark. The way Westwood handles this is brilliant: any testing based off of the additional AP curriculum will count as an opportunity to increase a grade, never decrease it.

Section Conclusion All of the cons aren’t really even cons. If you would like my recommended strategy, please read on.

The best strategy right now

Students

Take the classes with the best teachers. These are usually the AP classes. Only take the AP exams if you feel like it. I recommend taking them if you will be able to transfer credits in university. It is not necessary to take an AP exam if you take an AP course.

Teachers

Teach in depth and mark easily. I can think of some who already do this. I will leave it up to the teachers to decide if contributing to geographic grade inflation is worth it. In my opinion, it is.

Additional Important Notes

• It’s hard to choose just one favourite teacher for me because I genuinely believe I was blessed to be put in the best high school in North America, possibly the world.

• Below are the admission rates for UWaterloo engineering programs based on average grade. Notice the shape of the graph for the most competitive programs. For highly ambitious students, the grading scale is not linear. In fact, the importance of a certain grade is proportional to these lines, since any grade above ~70 is assigned value relative to the chances of university admission it grants. Teachers do not realize this, and often mistakenly treat the value of 1-2% the same on any point of the grade scale.

  An interesting idea would be to ask students what their goal program/university is, and mark on a relative scale that is proportional to its respective admission chances.

  

Some open questions/problems in Education

• Time is finite. It is very optimistic to want someone to learn everything, however depending on personal pacing, this isn’t always possible within the 14 - 22 years of schooling that people go through.
• Education never becomes hyper-personalized. Regardless of topic, every person has a unique learning environment in which they thrive depending on factors like speed/pacing, learning style, interest, etc.
• What is the best way to test the general intelligence of a person? What about domain intelligence? We don’t have an answer for this, but I’m keen on large language models being used here.
• Who deserves higher quality education?