I did my first two at a community college. While I don't doubt that you can find some high school courses equivalent to or superior to their college analogues, this is not the prevailing reality.
But such positive outliers have little to nothing to do with the AP brand, and much more to do with the course's teacher. They certainly have nothing to do with AP testing for equivalency credit, which occurs after the fact. AP testing is a shoddy placement tool which frequently and provably tends to overstate students' preparedness for advanced studies.
In STEM fields, anyway. Freshmen distribution survey courses don't do much to prepare you for anything particular, even at Yale.
I actually found my humanities requirements the most useful of my intro courses, as a CS major, outside the actual CS courses themselves. The required physics and chem classes were intellectually interesting and perhaps useful for understanding the world, but I've never really used them in my work.
On the other hand, my philosophy classes taught me how to write long-form scholarly essays, which construct and refute arguments and cite the literature as appropriate. In my current career as a CS academic, that's a quite core part of my job, and is something I didn't learn at all from my STEM courses. I'm glad I wasn't able to test out of those, because we sure didn't learn how to do that in high school AP English!
Exactly. Since top tier universities know that in practice, most of their undergraduate intake will have taken AP classes, it no longer makes sense to give credit for them.
Of course not all programs are created or implemented at an equal level, but the author's single experience and unreferenced conjectures present poor arguments.
- Asserting that AP classes are not equivalent to classes where he went to school is unhelpful. Mr. Tierney fails to mention that he went to Yale, making this anecdote disingenuous at best.
- Colleges no longer accepting AP credit is hardly the fault of AP courses. This point is presented without evidence.
- Marginal students being allowed into AP courses falls squarely on the schools; this has nothing to do with the value of the exams
- We should be looking for ways to extend AP classes to minorities, not taking them away from everyone else because minorities do not have access.
- Is the "...mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry" mentioned by the author more likely in an AP class or in a freshman lecture with 400 students taught by an adjunct?
- The issues the author mentions w.r.t. the College Board have nothing to do with the value of the AP exam, but the author intentionally conflates these issues.