Editorial: College Board rejects golden calf

When we feel wronged by certain people, it’s only natural that we might hesitate before… When we feel wronged by certain people, it’s only natural that we might hesitate before recognizing legitimate, sincere changes in their behavior.

Take the College Board.

Many of us who survived — scratch that — took AP courses in high school continue to shudder when forced to consider No. 2 pencils, barcode labels and shrink-wrapped exam booklets during the first weeks of May. The vast majority of those who went through the AP system don’t exactly applaud it as a transformative educational experience.

But as entrenched in American education as AP is, we ought to recognize a College Board achievement when we see one.

If we are to hold the College Board to its new AP course overhaul plan outlined this week in a New York Times article, then the nonprofit deserves some praise, as hard as it might be to dole out.

According the article, the board, which owns the AP exams, is beginning to revamp its tests so that the respective courses stress critical thinking instead of rote memorization. The board traditionally provides teachers of AP courses with a long, ambiguous list of concepts that could show up on the exams. Now, it is not only slashing some material as part of its new plan, it’s providing detailed standards for each subject. Revisions to the AP biology and U.S. history courses will go into effect by the fall of 2012, and the physics, chemistry, European history, world history and art history curricula will follow suit by 2015.

The fact that the College Board is setting more defined boundaries for AP courses might sound restricting, but in fact, in the AP environment, added structure is added freedom. As research in the fields on which the College Board tests has exploded in the past half-century, rapidly widening the range of subjects that could make it into exam questions, teachers are increasingly forced to shift their focus to the end goal. What we think of as educational mainstays — like student attainment, in-depth analysis and critical thinking ­­— fall limp and atrophy in favor of the newly valued priority of speed.

But speed is the golden calf of teaching, a false deity that we’re thrilled the College Board is finally relinquishing. If the board actually clarifies its requirements of teachers over the next few years, we can easily predict that students enrolled in AP classes will get more out of them. With refurbished AP courses that Trevor Packer, College Board’s vice president for Advanced Placement, described in the article as focusing “on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge,” educators can design their classes to consider issues in true, appreciable depth.

Because worrying over losing five minutes here or there is one way to run a barracks, not a classroom.