Davidson College is one of the most selective schools in North Carolina, and when considering applications, test scores are not administrators’ first concern. Courses such as advanced placement classes are.

“That level of academic coursework is the best measure we have to predict how they will do at Davidson,” said John Leach, assistant dean of admissions. “For admission, the rigor of a student’s high school curriculum is the first element we evaluate in their academic standing,”

As competition for college admission grows, transcripts showing challenging courses such as advanced placement have become more crucial. The advanced placement exams are administered by The College Board, which also publishes the SAT, while planning of the coursework itself has been left to the teachers.

This year, however, there has been a change. Starting in the fall 2007, a course cannot be called advanced placement on transcripts unless the teacher submits a detailed syllabus and gains approval from College Board beforehand, a process that even advanced placement’s leadership admits is a burden. Even with the new program under way, administrative details that affect college applications already submitted are still being resolved.

A change to traditional usage

The Advanced Placement Program offers a range of annual exams that mimics freshman college finals. While each college sets its own policies, high school graduates who score high enough on the advanced placement exams can earn college credit at most universities, sometimes eight or more semester hours per exam. A growing number of students apply to college with several advanced placement exams under their belt. More than 80 percent of the freshman class at the University of North Carolina submitted advanced placement scores this year, and half of them for more than five exams. At North Carolina State University, the number is more than 60 percent.

In North Carolina, more than 400 high schools offer advanced placement classes and nearly one-third of all high school students have an advanced placement course on their transcripts. However, the transcripts have become an issue, according to the College Board.

“Historically, AP was used [only] for credit and placement decisions, and for that you need an exam score,” said Trevor Packer, the College Board’s vice president in charge of the Advanced Placement Program. Recently, though, colleges are looking for external measures such as advanced placement coursework to judge applicants’ potential, he said, and they “had noticed trends they wanted controlled — isolated cases where schools were applying the AP label to courses that were not available in the exams, like astronomy.”

The Course Audit was conceived as a quality check to ensure that advanced placement courses on transcripts had, in fact, provided college-level instruction. While the program “unequivocally supports the principle that each individual school must develop its own curriculum,” teachers who followed advanced placement guidelines this year found the expected level of detail produced syllabi dozens of pages long. Packer reported submissions as large as 60 pages for a single class.

“It was almost like they were saying, ‘Audit this,’” he said.

A hoop, not a help

Betsy Newmark teaches advanced placement classes in history and government at Raleigh Charter School. Her two outlines totaled 39 pages, took three days of vacation to write, and didn’t add anything to her teaching of the courses, she said. Her colleagues described the requirement as “a real pain.”

Packer admitted that was the general response they heard. “Fifty-four percent of teachers say it’s just a hoop to jump through,” he said.

Newmark said the guidelines were flexible enough to accommodate curricula she used last year. “It was mostly a task of putting what I do into a form they would recognize,” she said. Other schools were more sensitive to the issue. David Johnson, principal of Calvary Baptist Day School in Winston-Salem, said although his teachers already had most of the documentation requested, “The tension any Christian school will feel is that AP is an outside curriculum. The question is how to maintain integrity when you implement it.”

Calvary offers 10 advanced placement courses, including an advanced placement biology course that some Christian educators have found controversial. The school has always strived to integrate faith with academic rigor, but “If you sell your soul to College Board, you lose your way,” Johnson said. “The moment you feel you’ve compromised, AP scores don’t matter at all.”

Private tutors and homeschoolers received the same authorization as classroom teachers, but administrative processes lagged in their case. Maria Green is a pharmacist who teaches advanced placement calculus to home-schooled students in the Triad. She and another advanced placement instructor spent two months trying to pin down the requirements, “calling and calling, and always we were told, ‘We’re working on it.’”

Issues remain for nontraditional students. Approved advanced placement programs are listed online to allow colleges to verify advanced placement classes on transcripts. Private tutors, however, aren’t listed, although the authorizations are granted by teacher and not by institution. Since college applications for fall 2008 are already being submitted, home schoolers were advised to attach advanced placement’s individual letters of authorization to their transcripts, which can add several pages to their paper work.

Toward a national curriculum?

With colleges’ increasing expectation of advanced placement-level classes, the detailed guidelines and new mandatory approval process, is advanced placement becoming a de facto national curriculum?

“On a certain level, you could almost look at it that way,” Newmark said.

The advanced placement audit is being used as a wedge in local issues. According to the College Board, about 17,000 advanced placement teachers have used the new course requirements to fight changes in laboratory schedules. Advanced Placement’s Tom Matts, the course audit’s director, said colleges have complained about students arriving with inadequate lab experience, so, “We think that’s a positive outcome of the audit.”

Whether advanced placement continues in its traditional purpose or follows a new path, its impact will continue to grow. The College Board reports that 98 percent of admissions officers plan to place greater emphasis on advanced placement coursework.

Hal Young is a contributing editor for Carolina Journal.