Each year the College Board sends out Advanced Placement test results in mid-July, ending an agony of waiting for both teachers and students. The resultsthis year were more charged than ever since my nearly 150 test-takers were my very last AP students.
I have always wanted students to do well, but this year I wanted them to do well so that my memories of this last group would have a rosy glow. Do you know how rare it is to teach nearly 150 teenagers and not have a single hostile cynic among the group? They were already nominated for my student hall of fame, and I wanted everything about them to be positive.
I checked the “College Confidential” forum “Post Your AP Scores” to see who had them. “Chicago got theirs yesterday!” “No scores still in D.C. Arghhhh…”
When the email went out from Oakton High School that scores were in, I made a beeline to the school and practically bumped into two other teachers on a similar mission. That night I read on the student website, “Fairfax got them today!”
The news was good. My students did better than my group of students last year, and there were more of the highest scores (4’s and 5’s) than in recent memory. It’s not unusual for a teacher’s scores to bounce up and down by up to ten percentage points from year-to-year, and my scores last year were down from the year before that, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to see them rise. Going out on a high note was exactly what I wanted to have happen, and it did.
Relatively high scores for the English Literature and Composition test was also gratifying because nearly half the senior class at Oakton High School takes the course, and Eliot Waxman and I work hard to keep all our students enrolled—even when the work proves challenging.
Some teachers encourage students to switch to a non-AP class at the first sign of trouble; student attrition yields higher scores in those classes. But that’s not the philosophy of Senior Seminar. We pride ourselves in welcoming students who have never taken an AP class. What better time to discover difficult reading and critical thinking than the year before college? Many of the students for whom the course is a stretch do not receive a “passing” score of 3, but the exposure to college-level work is well worth that sacrifice.
We root for every single student in AP. I know that, as a parent of children who attended public schools, I valued every challenge they met, and was especially grateful to teachers whose philosophies provided them with numerous ways to succeed. Any goal is reachable if there are multiple roads leading to that end.
Yes, the test was positive, and we all reached that goal together. Even students who didn’t pass the test passed the course and will be better prepared for college reading and thinking. I teach to the test, and I teach to the student—the scores being but a small measure of what happens in the classroom. But I love it when that measure shows success!
Erica Jacobs teaches at George Mason University. Email her at [email protected].
