The link between advanced placement experience and early college success.

• Author: Klopfenstein, Kristin

1. Introduction

   At its inception in 1957, the Advanced Placement (AP) Program was designed to allow high school students to earn credit, or at least advanced placement, for college-level coursework, thereby avoiding needless repetition once these students arrived at college. The Program primarily served students from elite private high schools. While the structure of the AP Program has not changed in 50 years, its scope has broadened dramatically. In 1960, 890 secondary schools participated in the AP Program. Forty years later, that number had risen to 13,253. Today, 15,122 U.S. schools offer AP courses, and 12,037 of those schools are public high schools (College Board 2007). Regardless of the exam-taking that earns students college credit, AP course-taking has become a primary signal used to identify motivated, high-achieving students in the college admissions process (Breland et al. 2002). In addition, state policy makers have begun mandating the inclusion of AP courses in their districts and high schools (see Table 1). This expansion proceeds with very little rigorous empirical evidence regarding the benefits and costs of AP participation.

   The College Board provides plenty of studies showing that passing AP exam scores are strong predictors of college success (e.g., Willingham and Morris 1986; Morgan and Manackshana 2000; Hargrove, Godin, and Dodd 2007; and Keng and Dodd 2007). However, the public, including legislators, interpret this to mean that high AP exam scores cause college success, and subsequently infer that the expansion of the AP program will improve college outcomes for an expanded set of AP takers. This faulty reasoning does not come without costs. AP Programs can be emphasized, or even mandated, at the expense of other proven curricula or programs in the following ways: i) the best, most experienced teachers are assigned to small AP classes, while the non-AP classes necessarily grow larger; ii) schools, often with subsidies from the state or federal government, pay for AP teachers to attend the AP summer institute; iii) science labs must be equipped with more expensive equipment; iv) AP exam fees are subsidized, usually for low income students, but sometimes for all students regardless of need; and v) textbooks must be replaced more frequently (Klopfenstein and Thomas 2007).

   This paper uses an extensively specified regression analysis to investigate AP course-taking as a potential cause of early college success. Because it is impossible to randomly assign students to AP courses, as an ideal experiment necessitates, we employ regression analysis using an extensive administrative database of all Texas public school students who entered Texas public universities directly after graduating from high school in May 1999. Our data are unique in that we are able to include a broad range of variables describing the student's non-AP curricular experience. We show that failing to control for the student's non-AP curricular experience leads to positively biased AP coefficients. Math is frequently shown to be a strong predictor of college success, so the omission of math-taking information in previous studies is particularly problematic (e.g., Rose and Betts 2001; Sadler and Tai 2007). We find no evidence that AP course-taking increases the likelihood of early college success beyond that predicted by the non-AP curriculum for the average student, regardless of race or family income. This finding casts serious doubt on the causal effect of AP experience on college success.

   AP course experience matters now more than ever. In 2000, a survey of 962 four-year public and private colleges and universities showed that AP experience factors directly or indirectly into five of the top six criteria in college admissions (see Table 2). Grades on AP exams rank ninth. Note that the five criteria valued most heavily by colleges do not depend on AP exam scores, but on course participation. A 2005 survey of 539 public and private four-year and two-year colleges and universities supports the Breland survey. According to Sathre and Blanco (2006), 91% of the postsecondary institutions surveyed take AP into account in their admissions process.

   Given that grade point averages (GPA) and class rank, as calculated by the high school, are the number one criteria in the admissions process, it is necessary to examine the non-trivial role of AP experience in these outcomes. Weighting grades in AP courses more heavily than grades in other courses is common practice. While grade weighting is not mandated in Texas, as it is in some other states (e.g., North Carolina), 98% of all Texas public high schools weight AP grades more heavily than other course grades when calculating class rank (College Board 2006, author's survey). (1) The College Board provides no grade-weighting guidelines, so weighting schemes vary dramatically across schools. The most common methods are to add one point on a four-point scale, yielding a 25% weight, or to add 10 points on a 100-point scale, yielding a 10% weight. In schools with a large number of AP course offerings, students must take a substantial number of AP courses to remain competitive in class rank.

   The College Board is conspicuously silent on the use of AP in admissions decisions. Intentionally or not, the College Board supports the use of AP for admissions purposes by advertising AP classes as "college prep." Moreover, as revealed by President George W. Bush's remarks in his 2006 State of the Union Address, government at all levels is devoting considerable resources to expand the program further under the pretense that AP courses are college preparatory. In Section 1702 of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the federal government supports "state and local efforts to raise academic standards through advanced placement programs, and thus further increase the number of students who participate and succeed in advanced placement programs" (U.S. Department of Education 2004). In 2006, they granted $5,867,284 to 26 states to help them achieve that goal through test fee subsidies (U.S. Department of Education 2006). Such efforts are driven, in large part, by a competitive college admissions process that places extraordinary emphasis on AP course work. The consequences of the decision to emphasize AP in admissions reach beyond the university itself. Fully aware of admissions policies, upper-class parents demand that schools maximize their AP course offerings. This places school administrators in the unenviable position of deciding whether to redirect resources from other areas of need in order to expand their AP Program.

   Admissions officials, parents, and state legislators are not the only stakeholders in the expansion of AP. The Education Commission of the States (ECS) is a prominent think-tank that used to manage the National Assessment of Educational Progress for the federal government. ECS currently recommends that every state adopt a comprehensive AP policy (Dounay 2006). Its central recommendation is for every state to mandate that a minimum number of AP courses be offered at every high school. At a minimum, they propose that all states provide financial incentives to encourage schools and districts to offer AP. Implicit behind policies that encourage AP participation is the belief that AP experience prepares students for college-level work. However, the widespread belief that AP experience produces positive outcomes in college has remained largely untested.

2. Conceptual Framework

   There are two theories to explain why AP experience might be a good predictor of early college success. First, AP experience signals two important but difficult to measure personal characteristics: ability and motivation. Second, AP experience might build human capital, in which case AP participation is good preparation for college. AP exposes students to college-level material in a supportive high school environment, where students are, presumably, more likely to receive the individualized attention they need to develop study skills and habits of mind that will serve them well in college.

   The two models are not mutually exclusive, and colleges are indifferent with respect to which model is at work, because a high-quality student is identified either way. However, from a policy standpoint, distinguishing which avenue is more or less at play is important. The human capital model provides justification for broadly expanding AP participation, while the signaling model does not. Before these theories can be disentangled, however, it must be determined that AP experience is in fact a good predictor of college success at all.

   Prior research on the predictive power of AP course experience on college success is not compelling. Studies from the College Board, owner of the AP trademark, and the Educational Testing Service (ETS), administrator of the yearly AP examinations, are frequently cited by AP Program proponents (Willingham and Morris 1986; Morgan and Maneckshana 2000). The descriptive nature of these studies, however, is insufficient for isolating the independent impact of the AP Program, given that the typical AP student is bright, motivated, and likely to experience positive college outcomes regardless of AP experience. The public enthusiasm for AP waxes unabated, however, as shown by Newsweek's ranking of high schools based exclusively on the ratio of the number of AP exams taken to the number of graduating seniors. "The idea is that schools should be recognized for pushing even average students to take challenging AP courses, the more, the better" (Winerip 2006).

   One study frequently cited by AP proponents as evidence of the program's success is Adelman's Answers in the Tool Box (1999). In The Tool Box Revisited (2006), a modified replication of his earlier study, Adelman makes it clear that his results have been repeatedly misinterpreted. In his original study, Adelman finds that a rigorous high school...