Why Advanced Placement (AP) Courses Are Changing

Campbell's Biology for AP courses is a classic text for teachers to use for AP Biology. While it is an excellent book, it has over 1,200 pages of materials on nearly all branches of biology. For high school teachers though, essentially anything in this tome is a fair game.

This is exactly why teachers like Joan Carlson in Worchester, Massachusetts, said to The New York Times, "Some of the students look at the book [used by her AP Biology class] and says, 'My gosh, it's just like an encyclopedia.'"¹ After personally using a non-AP version of this book for my undergraduate-level biology course as described in my other article, I know the challenge of just reading that book, not to mention teaching from it.

So, I can only imagine trying to teach even half of all the materials in that book while including homework assignments, quizzes, exams, and individual projects. It would be no surprise that many teachers simply rely on PowerPoints, which are not always the most effective means of teaching as I discussed previously. In addition, they become pressured by the need to produce a didactic method to achieve numeric success without being able to convey genuine interest in biology.

Disapproval from Universities and Beyond

Even when I was applying to colleges and universities on my senior year, I thought that by taking challenging courses designated as AP and performing well on AP exams by College Board, I would be viewed more positively by graduate and medical schools. The truth is, however, that many medical schools actually discourage students from using AP Biology courses to fulfill the prerequisite requirements and have students enroll in Introductory Biology courses. Not surprisingly, in the same article by Christopher Drew, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology implemented a new policy in 2007 that prevented students from receiving credits in biology from AP exams.¹

Indeed, after personally seeing videos from MIT OpenCourseware and other podcast lectures, I know for a fact that these courses are much more challenging than the meager AP Biology offered in high school level. There is just no time available to provide an equal level of rigor in biology courses, and as a result, such policy like the one from MIT has been in place. So, what does the student get out of from taking a class like AP Biology?

Answer: they learn how to memorize a litany of complicated facts without learning how to integrate the information. They may "know" the steps of glycolysis, but they would not be able to understand what happens when control enzymes are inhibited. In other words, they would be able to regurgitate details but would not be approach the sciences in the ways that scientists should.

Naïve and Inexperienced Students

A very important point that Christopher Drew mentioned in that article was how teachers had to cover basic labs that were likely to be tested in AP Biology exams. As a result, while students may understand these very basic labs, they would be at complete loss for real laboratory work in college, where the process usually consists of at least a week or two of experiments, followed by several pages of laboratory reports with graphs and citations from primary journals. The difference here is the "thinking" process. In labs oriented for AP Biology exams, the questions asked are geared towards what the College Board wants the student to think.

Instead, it should be emphasized more that an average, non-rocket scientist student learns how to ask these "thinking" questions. It could be simple as exploring the growth rate of certain plants. A good lab would be to have students come up with their own hypothesis on how to increase the growth rate of the plants, come up with a way to measure the growth rate, and write a short paper on their conclusion. Like the undergraduate courses, this kind of lab would allow students to think for themselves and not simply do something because of one exam.

Works Cited

¹ Christopher Drew, "Rethinking Advanced Placement," The New York Times, 7 Jan. 2011.