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If that is what you meant by "the whole point", then I don't understand why it was germane to the comment to which you were originally responding.
All of this stuff about why students take the course is irrelevant to what the "whole point" of the course is, because I was referring to why AP courses are offered and why teachers teach them, given the extra work load. Which, after all, is the entire point of this thread, which is about why Florida does not want to **offer **the course. After all, if the only germane issue is whether offering the course might allow students to get college credit early, presumably FL would offer every AP class it can.
Getting college credit is not the primary explicit incentive. It might be the primary concrete incentive, but that is not the same thing. For example, the College Board explicitly tells students: "Research consistently shows that AP students are better prepared for college than students who don’t take AP, regardless of their exam score." It also claims that AP courses allow students to develop college skills and "discover your passion." Moreover, remember above when I noted that students kept signing up for my class despite knowing that they were very unlikely to pass the test? And when I say very unlikely, I mean very, very unlikely. Apparently, there was some other incentive. Why, for example, did a student who did not pass the test (despite being, according to her younger siblings the smartest one in the family) drag her younger brother into my AP class by the ear at the beginning of the next year and insist that he transfer in? It wasn't because she thought he would pass the test.
As for this:
Where did I, even once, say that a student ever claimed that they were fascinated by world history, or that I was a brilliant, or even competent teacher? I never claimed that, or anything close to it. Students gave me lots of reasons for taking the class, but I don't recall a single one offering those reasons.
But I can tell you that many students who took my AP World History class as 10th graders worked hard to get in my Economics/Govt class as seniors. But, why??? It wasn't an AP class. So, what was the point? Well, I can tell you that on ratemyteachers.com, a student (anonymously) said: "Take Mr. X if you want to learn, but have lots of homework. Take Mr. Danning if you want to learn, but have less homework."
I can also tell you that an ex-student emailed me out of the blue after I left the school (so, no reason for flattery) and said:
And another student emailed me after he graduated from UC Berkeley:
And another:
Notice the common theme of learning, and preparation for success in college? So, yes, while of course students value passing the AP test, they also value those things as well. Which goes back to my initial point, which was: "As I discuss elsewhere, [passing the test] is not the whole point of AP courses. The point of AP courses is to enhance student learning."
This is all great and I'm glad you are teacher of the year straight out of an inspirational Oscar-winning high school film, but again it all comes down to this:
Even if you can come up with some other tangential incentives, and even if you can formulate them as explicit ones to some degree, the test still dominates the structure of the process (again, the students' experiences and how they recollect them are mostly irrelevant, so all of your provided e-mails don't mean anything).
That by itself is essentially implicit in the concept of a test. If the test didn't do that, then they either wouldn't provide a test or they'd make a different test. Evaluations are not randomly attached to that which isn't structured by/related to the evaluation. When you get to the end of clown college, you don't take a law exam. When you're at trade school learning plumbing, they don't suddenly drop a computer science exercise on you.
Even if this effect is indirect (which I'll grant it likely mostly is in many cases) and only accounts for say 20% of a course's content (which I think is likely majorly lowballing it), that's still enough to easily hopelessly bias the essential frame of reference of the whole thing, in spite of whatever teachers try to do to counteract that, meaning objectivity is destroyed. Remember, this whole conversation is about whether or not these classes should be allowed by the people who oppose them as possibly capable of being objective and not treated as enemy propaganda factories. Unless you can prove the test has a 0% biasing effect or is 0% biased itself, then you can't prove the objectivity argument.
I think you being a good teacher, which makes you feel good and provides a basis of self-esteem for you, biases you towards associating too much of a positive valence with teaching as a whole for you to be objective enough yourself here. (For the record, I am not the opposite. I've had good and bad teachers. I don't assign any particular positive or negative feelings to the whole profession, just certain modern degenerate manifestations of it.) You want to believe in the heroic, independent teacher who will resist the evils of mere evaluation instead of true learning, because perhaps you are that to some degree, but unfortunately all of the facts in the statistical aggregate disagree with you. There wouldn't be standardized tests if they didn't do anything. The bodies that make them aren't that dumb.
To evaluate is to claim a mantle of power (which can even be good sometimes in this area, like to claim the power to determine who objectively understands calculus, which is pretty hard to bias malevolently). People who have claimed such a mantle of power are not giving their tools of dissemination full and complete independence en masse in actuality, regardless of what their promotional literature claims. Maybe they won't force you to strictly teach to the test, but that's because they know they don't need to. If they thought they did, they'd either force you to or change the test.
When we know we're dealing with a subject that can be heavily biased in a malicious fashion, it's thus best to just avoid the whole thing instead of, again, expending great effort to work around structural flaws we didn't even cause to tirelessly seek an outcome we barely even care about anyway ("we" being us right-wingers here). We, for the most part, do not give a fuck if "African-American Studies" is taught at all, much less if it has an AP equivalent. So why should we even worry about anything we're talking about here (other than as a purely intellectual exercise, as this is the forum for it) in an attempt to disarm a complex bomb we could just keep locked away anyway?
That wasn't the point. And, frankly, you are being rude.
To the extent this has any meaning, it is both wrong and circular. It is wrong because we are talking about what is taught and how it is taught, which is dominated not by test, but by the course description, which sets out the topics to be covered and the skills to be imparted. The test is a means of assessing the extent to which those goals have been met. That is why desired outcomes are developed first, and tests last. And that is how it is done in AP, unless I have been lied to in my many conversations on the topic by the UC Berkeley prof who was the chair of AP World History committee. Example: Do teachers spend time in AP classes teaching students tricks about how to game multiple choice tests? That would make sense if the test dominates the structure of the process. But "how to game multiple choice tests" is not a skill listed in any AP course description that I know of. And that is why this part of your argument is wrong:
Evaluations are not randomly attached to that which isn't structured by/related to the course content, not to the evaluation itself.
It is circular because the test "dominates the structure of the process" of teaching the course only if the teacher so chooses. This is a well-worn pedagogical issue: there is even a Wikipedia page re "teaching to the test", and it is related to the age-old dilemmas of "breadth versus depth" as well as "content versus skills" (for example, although CA's History-Social Studies standards includes both content standards and skills standards, for all intents and purposes only the content standards are tested on state tests).
My entire point is that a teacher who runs their AP class such that the "whole point" is getting students to pass the test has made a **choice **to do so, and a bad one.
All of this is complete, unadulterated bullshit. I never once said that evaluation is evil. I evaluated students all the time. Every time I assigned an essay, which was about fifteen times per year, I spent hours (60-70 essays x 15 min each) grading them. I wouldn't do that if I thought evaluation is evil. Please explain to me how the claim, "the purpose of an AP class is learning, not passing the test" implies "all evaluation is evil." It doesn't.
And, I note that you still have not explained why students kept taking my class.
Finally, I don't know whether you have kids, but supposing you did, which teacher would you choose for your child:
Teacher A: "The goal of my AP class is to teach students how to pass the test. They won't actually learn any useful skills, and everything they learn will be forgotten ten minutes after the test is over, but they will enter college with at least five credits."
Teacher B: "It would be nice if students pass the AP test, but that is not the goal of this class. The goal is to give students the writing and analysis skill that will make it easier for them to succeed in college. Because teaching those skills is time consuming, we will not have time to cover all the material that is likely to be on the AP test."
I suppose you might choose Teacher A, but can you see why many, many parents would choose Teacher B? And do you see why, when a parent at back to school night was told that my class was very hard, did not respond, "If the class is not hard, you will not pass the AP test", but rather, "If the class is not hard, you will not learn anything"? The parent, btw, seemed to be neither drunk nor insane.
Edit: Here is another hypothetical. Your kid is a HS senior and has room for one AP class in his schedule. He says that he has two choices:
AP African American Studies, which although it is educationally valueless, he is sure he can get a 5 on the test and earn college credit
AP Statistics, which will enhance his knowledge of statistics, but he is sure he will get no more than a 3 on the test, so he will get no college credit.
He asks for you advice re what to tell him. What will you say? And, what do you think most parents will say?
Don't care. Gish Galloping with me pointless anecdotal content is also rude.
Okay, so then we have to trust them not to bias the desired outcomes. What's the difference? It's toma(y)to/toma(h)to. (By the way, in terms of incentive structure, it doesn't matter which one is formulated first. Government priorities are generally formulated before actual laws, but it's the actual laws that create the incentives, not the priorities that led to them.)
My brother in (non-Jewish) Christ, it is literally the same entity that largely dictates both as you just admitted above. You are splitting hairs thinner than those on an 80 year old man's head.
And, I note you have not addressed to any degree whether or not any of this has any relevance to the central conversational subject of these courses being possibly objective or not or why anyone who has not much interest in them inherently should expend any effort on fighting the institutional capture of the educational system to try to make them so.
All of your other arguments are fluff. If we knew the College Board were almost certainly biased in favor of brutally murdering puppies for no reason, and we know that they're designing the course objectives and test, then all of their disclaimers of "But teachers have independent license to teach what they want! They don't have to teach that killing puppies is a good thing. They can just teach the merits of each position pro or con, purely objective. I mean sure, that killing puppies in all contexts is good is the correct answer on the test, but it's still their choice to go along with it!" would mean nothing (and indeed this is exactly the position that would be held by the left if the College Board had even a sniff of right-wing bias instead of overwhelming left-wing bias) and nobody would want them disseminating an Animal Ethics course.
This is all just basic logic that you can't worm your way around no matter how hard you try. If judges can be biased towards giving people years more or less in prison by how satisfying their lunch was, then no way in hell can you get an objective course out of a biased institution, no matter how many quibbles about teacher independence or whether anyone actually cares about the tests or not (which just happen to be offered to every student and have millions spent on their formulation and dissemination every year, you know, just what you'd expect from something that nobody cares about and doesn't influence incentives at all) that you can come up with. It doesn't matter.
Your defense of this here just seems to be the usual pattern where left-aligned institutions, particularly captured ones that were perhaps in the past more objective, and their defenders still seem to think they should have some unfettered right to skate by on their previous reputation above suspicion, even though their right-wing equivalents would never get the same courtesy. Perhaps I seem unreasonably suspicious to you, unjustifiably ardent and implacable in my insistence that the College Board receive zero benefit of the doubt. Well that is exactly the posture that anything right-wing has been met with for years. So the same to the other side is the natural response.
Irrelevant to the question of what the purpose of AP classes is
Irrelevant to the question of what the purpose of AP classes is
From my initial post: "Now, I am not a fan of most "studies" courses, because, in my limited experience, they tend to lack rigor and often push a political viewpoint,"
Irrelevant to the question of what the purpose of AP classes is
Irrelevant to the question of what the purpose of AP classes is
Irrelevant to the question of what the purpose of AP classes is.
Infantile
Apparently, you are no longer interested in defending your claim that "the whole point of AP courses is the test." Which is certainly understandable.
Yes, I am no longer interested in arguing about something you are blatantly wrong about and that also has not much relevance to the central issue at controversy anyway.
It might not have much relevance to the central issue, but you are the one who brought it up in the first place. It’s like the kid who is losing the game so takes his ball and runs away.
I brought it up because of its relevance to the central issue only, not because I want to argue about what color the barn should be instead of building it. It is not a game to me, because to me making a game of autistic nitpicking is what is most juvenile and also a waste of life. If you wanna see that as me running away with the ball then so be it. It affects me none. Enjoy your tangential nothings.
LOL nice try!
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