![]() ![]() Lacking that focus on the end goal, the AP program, with “its canned content and automated grading” has shifted focus to an “anti-intellectual approach-expecting teachers to prioritize a corporation’s authority, reductive curriculum, and mediated relationships with students.” “One part of the puzzle,” she wrote, “is that, in pursuit of other aims, we've lost sight of what liberal education can do for students, teachers, communities.” Instead, Abrams shows us a writing course that is about simply checking certain boxes to satisfy computerized evaluation and a history course that straps teachers and students to a breakneck race through a list of required topics.Ībrams portrays a complex picture of how that happened, but in an email, she pointed to one root cause of AP’s loss of vision. That, unfortunately became part of the story of Advanced Placement, as the courses became anchored to testing and a tightly dictated program that has locked teachers and students into a tightly defined program, even though “the program’s architects had specifically warned about the kinds of threats” the program posed to teachers and students. As Oberlin professor Luke Steiner, who turned down the chance to head up the examination chair for his discipline once observed, “formal examinations, if emphasized, tend to distort the learning process.” ![]() Examinations would turn out to be a problematic area for AP courses. ![]()
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