AP Failure Rate Rising
Advanced Placement courses are more popular than ever. But perhaps that’s not such a good thing. USA Today reports that while a record 2.9 million students took AP exams last year, the failure rate keeps climbing. The national failure rate last year was 41.5 percent, up from 36.5 percent in 1999, the newspaper reports. In the American South, it was worse: 48.4 percent failed, a 7 percentage point increase from a decade ago. The results indicate that schools are pushing too many kids into AP classes without adequate preparation and that they’re not sufficiently training teachers to deliver university-level materials, USAT says. States with the best pass rates include Michigan, Ohio and Utah. States with the highest failure rates include West Virginia, Mississippi and New Mexico. The College Board, however, says that AP failure rates are not monolithic. It notes that AP physics scores are consistently increasing while AP English literature scores are dropping as rapidly as characters in a Shakespeare tragedy.
Filed under: K-12 Education News
