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How many AP students have you polled about this?
Quite a few, actually. In the form of revealed preferences. And I have certainly had lengthy discussions with school policy makers and accreditors, and that is precisely why policy makers pushed to enhance AP offerings, and why accreditors pushed them to do so.
So you've guessed what they think?
Well, suppose you, like I did, taught an AP history class which emphasizes acquiring the skills needed for success in college rather than test prep. Suppose also you explicitly told students that that is the goal and that they will have to do a lot of outside work if they want to pass the AP test. Suppose also that very few students pass the test each year. Suppose also that the course demands a great deal of student time, and students in the class get Bs and Cs for the first time ever. Supoose also that, despite all that, each year the younger siblings and friends of those students sign up for two periods of the class in numbers that exceed the contractual class maximum. Would you infer from that that the students are motivated by a desire for college credit? Assume also that the students are not morons.
By this logic, people who enter a lottery don't actually want to win.
And even then, we're supposed to base our opinion off of your one little heterodox experiment? I know many people who took AP classes including myself. The test/college credit was the main focus.
Incidentally, you don't think it might have been a little dishonest to not have disclosed that you are/were a teacher of AP courses in this discussion sooner?
Whether they hope to win is not the issue. The issue is whether they get benefits even if they don't win. People go to Vegas, and to the track, even though they know that they probably won't win, because the experience is fun. People attend football games for awful teams with no hope of winning, and the players on the team play the game, because there are additional benefits other than winning. Winning is a nice bonus, but it is not necessarily the be all and end all.
And I know literally hundreds of people who have taken AP classes.
I don't know what would be "dishonest" about it, but in my initial post, I did say: "I have attended several AP trainings in my day,'
And yet with all of these examples the winning/competition still dictates of most of the incentives of the whole endeavor, hence my point. People may get ancillary benefits from football or betting on horse racing other than winning but the whole activity is still designed around winning and this dictates most of its structure. People may have fun betting on horses even if they still lose, but for the most part they pick horses they think are going to win and hope they do. People may support their local team even if they don't win, but they still want them to and get pissed if they blatantly don't try or play like shit.
And yet some of the most enjoyable games of football and baseball that I have personally played have been ones in which I lost. Yes, winning is more fun than losing, and taking an AP class and then getting college credit is better than taking that same class and not getting credit. But I never said otherwise. I merely challenged the claim that "the whole point" of the course is the test. It simply is not the whole point. It is not the only reason students take it, and it most certainly is not the only reason, or even a major reason, that schools offer it.
And yet, again, even those games were fully structured around winning, with the concept and pursuit of winning dictating almost all of their organization, structure, and procedure, even if it didn't happen for you that time (though it did happen for the other team, same as in any AP class almost certainly at least one kid will take the test and pass).
I think you're confused. For me to say that AP tests (and the resultant college credit) are "the whole point" (as colloquial language meaning "the vast majority of the point") of AP classes in this context, it is not necessary that they even be the primary reason (in terms of conscious reckoning/explanation anyway, which as rat-adjacents we should all know often lies to us about our real motivations) why students take them or schools offer them (though I definitely think you're understating both of those cases anyway and especially ignoring that students have an obvious motive to flatter you by saying "Oh no Mr. X, we don't care about the test or the college credit; we just find the subject and your brilliant teaching of it fascinating!"). It is only necessary that they be the primary explicit incentive the system is structured around, and that's easy, because they're the only explicit incentive on offer.
Behavioral patterns are always in the statistical aggregate primarily dictated by incentives, especially explicit/highly legible ones, even when people don't particularly like or enjoy them. Incentives are always in the statistical aggregate primarily dictated by tangible punishments and rewards, even when people would prefer to punished or rewarded differently. These are simple and essentially universal sociological/psychological truths that only a fool would disregard on the (lack of) strength of your anecdotes.
Of course even this is all irrelevant to the question of whether these courses can be taught objectively or not; both a course taught to the test and one taught independently can be the subject of severe bias. So you wouldn't be making any headway in advancing your central argument even if you weren't obviously wrong about this tangential, inconsequential point.
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